Just Thinking: An Interview of Paris-Based Artist Ladji Diaby

 
 


April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris.

PAIGE SILVERIA: Can you give us some background on yourself? Where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid? 

LADJI DIABY: I'm the first born of six children who lived in a communist city named Ivry-sur-Seine in the South of Paris during my entire childhood. When I was a kid, I was very quiet and impulsive. I didn't have many friends and I hardly went out. I was just a nerd who didn't have the money to buy a computer or a console. But I have good memories of this time when my brother and sisters were my true best friends, (they still are), but they would always follow me in my dumbass game ideas.

SILVERIA: What made the city communist? How did communism manifest in your daily life?

DIABY: I don't know, the city has been run by the PCF [French Communist Party] since 1925, the trust is there. (laughs) Above all that, this city has a real respect for the people who populate it and their diversity.

SILVERIA: What did you nerd out on? What were your interests?

DIABY: Manga and video games especially, I was obsessed with the stories they told, I projected myself a lot, that allowed me to tolerate a lot of things.

SILVERIA: (laughs) What dumbass game ideas did you play with your brother and sisters?

DIABY: I had a lot of fun writing new versions of all the fictional narratives that fascinated me, especially the animated ones, it was like writing a play. I would call on them afterwards to give them their roles while explaining the laws of the universe in question and the modifications that I wanted to make, I could be quite tyrannical. (laughs) I was obsessed with that. Nothing made me happier than to project myself into these universes and I thank Allah that my brother and sisters never mocked me for it. Sometimes I tell myself that my practice began at that moment to such a degree that it influenced my entire relationship to reality. I wanted to put my whole life and the other fictions — whether I liked them or not — into this game. I wanted to give a place to everything on this Earth and beyond.

SILVERIA: I read in a press release for a past show of yours that your work is really linked to your family and origins. Tell me about your family and their influence on you and your work. 

DIABY: First of all, I'd like to make it clear that I don't have a subject or theme in my work, it bores me. I only work with what's close to me, what's part of my social reality and what builds me up in my human experience. Most of the time, it's stories we haven't chosen to tell. My family is the closest thing to me and also the most important thing in my life that I didn't choose. I'm the eldest of a family of six children originally from Mali, of Muslim faith, and living in France. So, of course, all of this will come to light. I don't ask myself any questions, I just have the impression that when I execute a gesture with the aim of producing a piece, it's as if my memory were a piece of land and the fact of thinking, of having the will to do something with my hands, ploughs this memory land and brings to the surface stories that are beyond me most of the time. I'm not a very inspired person. In fact, I started collecting objects from the streets or from my family for my productions because the idea of putting money into making “art” made me sick. I needed to set up an attitude, a climate where I could produce no matter what, even if I went broke again.

SILVERIA: You use a large array of materials — like your parents' bed — and processes in your work, can you describe your practice? 

DIABY: When I describe my practice, I often say that going into the studio is like going into a casino; each production is a slot machine. I assemble and I break and I repeat until I find a good combination, a beautiful shape. It's a potential that depends solely on my luck. Slot machines are a potential fortune, my pieces are potential stories. By this I mean that when I use an object I've recovered or an image I've found, I don't actually find it; we meet and they tell me what I can and can't do with them. It's like sampling, you're going to use excerpts from pre-existing samples without understanding the whole story behind them, but your sensibility calls you to a kind of obviousness, I trust this obviousness, which tells me that our history, the actions of me and those I love (family, friends, and heroes) have value and deserve to exist. 

SILVERIA: I love that. The video featured in this show is called “A bird against a window, people see the devil in the clouds.” Can you elaborate on the title and some of the footage you included in it? 

DIABY: I gave it this title because, basically, I don't give a title to my productions. So, I said to myself in an exceptional case I'm going to give it a title that one would never remember, but if we make an effort to remember it, it’s not for nothing. The title simply illustrates my feeling in making this video with images I find that I like and that I know, but once again, I don't understand everything. I remembered myself as a child who understood nothing in English, spending all my time in front of the TV watching rap clips and other African-American visual productions, and trying to project myself, model myself as a young Malian living in France on it — either to dream of a future or to understand a present. The whole point of the video is in this feeling, because gradually I realize that in my work the Ladji emancipate and the Ladji alienate coexist rather well.

SILVERIA: Can you elaborate a bit on “the Ladji emancipate and the Ladji alienate coexist rather well?”

DIABY: When I work, I start from the idea that each thing that is alienating can perhaps, through an error of understanding, become emancipatory; the stories that I can mobilize, voluntarily or not, always begin with a form of alienation — or maybe an unhealthy fascination with say violence and sex as a reason to love and see films. I don't think it's a noble reason that leads me to make art. I remember wanting to do all that to dominate, to become someone, to betray my own social class and those who look like me to join the elites. I wanted to be respected, it was only a feeling, a desire, but I will never forget because in hindsight, I see what I could have become and it makes me laugh as much as it scares me. But it was time to grow up and realize that I could not be a white man, that the art that I make, and how I think about it, my very presence in France, are a consequence of colonization and slavery. It is important for me to remind myself that my work is also the product of an ultra violent story led and told by the dominant white classes and with which I deal.

SILVERIA: What are your thoughts on the art community in Paris? What's your experience of showing work here? 

DIABY: I don't trust them. Honestly, if I thought about the artistic community in Paris every day, I would have stopped working a long time ago. Too many people are afraid of being replaced. If that's not what makes them so closed and competitive it's because they have the devil in them, I don't know. But thank God I was able to meet beautiful people and I remember that I still take great pleasure in producing things with my hands, there is nothing that makes me happier. As for showing my work, I think it's just time I show it to those who look like me.

SILVERIA: Where and how would you ideally show the work? 

DIABY: I don't have the answer yet, but I am sure of one thing: the exhibition model for our work, the white cube, has largely reached its limits. It's become, if it wasn't already like this, a space for political disarming, as if any discourse whatsoever in this space were the same and could only have the impact of a sword in the water. I think the response has to be collective, multi-voiced and open, so that we shift the political question to the question of disseminating our work, which in my opinion, is the real political bias in an artist's work, and no longer in what we can say in our productions.

SILVERIA: You're in Dakar now for four months. What are you up to? Are you working on anything in particular while you're there? 

DIABY: Just thinking.

SILVERIA: That sounds lovely.

Preservation is on view through April 19 @ CØR Studio 28 Rue du Petit Musc, Paris

 
 

I Wanna Be Adored: An Interview of Sculptor Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles

 

Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.

 

interview by Summer Bowie

“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects.

SUMMER BOWIE: The exhibition takes its title from the 1989 hit by legendary Madchester Shoe Gazeband The Stone Roses. Lead singer Ian Brown was quoted in Clash Magazine saying,“If you want to be adored, it’s like a sin, like lust or gluttony or something like that.” Do you agree, or is the idea of moralizing our desires sort of antiquated?

HOLLY SILIUS: Besides the fact that it is simply a favorite track of mine, it felt apt to name my first solo show I wanna be adored for two reasons: firstly because I like to acknowledge and be patriotic to my roots, I come from Manchester myself, but secondly, because of the relevance the words gave to me when I was putting the pieces together, much further away from Manchester, in LA. Los Angeles is synonymous with a sense of “lust for fame” — it is the land where people go to gain adoration. The works I have made and accumulated over the last few years are all of people that are adored already in some way and they appear to me to desire more and actually deserve more recognition. The works also reflect perhaps a vulnerable side of me too. Maybe it is just that we all want to and should be cherished, noticed, and validated.

BOWIE: Your practice takes inspiration from studies of morphology. What role do linguistics play in your sculptural practice?

SILIUS: My sculptural practice is definitely that of a ‘tangible language’ through the form of the body in whatever way the sitter is casted. Whoever I work with I tend to try to understand their personality before, if I have some time and I have to be flexible with this, I am able to consider how their body communicates with me personally, how I perceive them and I also consider how they are perceived by a wider audience, and what speaks to me to capture them frozen in that body time capsule. This can be over a few years or a day, depending on the opportunity with that person. The piece of Penny Slinger I had been thinking about for a few years but I didn’t know exactly when I would have the platform to demonstrate her in the way I felt she deserved, and as my show was approaching, I felt the urge to make some more bronze pieces. For me, bronze already communicates the dedication behind a piece and the person. I also needed to express more with Penny than using the classic polished bronze, she needed a material as unique as she is, which is where the blow torching came in. That was so much fun, and the unpredictable nature of the chemical reactions within the metal depicted exactly what I wanted to convey.

Holly Silius. Lio Mehiel, 2021. Stone and steel.

Holly Silius. Rain Valdez, 2022. Stone and steel.

BOWIE: How do you choose which body parts to cast with your subjects and the materials for each?

SILIUS: When I am working with a person and I have a vision of the final piece and which body parts I will use, it tends to be because I see a way in which they represent themselves to me, and then I talk with the person more and we develop a casting position that is comfortable. Sometimes, I procrastinate on a casting for a long time as its such an intimate experience that I want to really make it into something that is super considered and I take care of people's time and image. The materials I use evolve over time but everything I use feels very heavy and is representative of the statement I am making about my subject. I can't afford to make mistakes, because they are set in stone or something else so definitive. But the finish can be organic and unpredictable, which I enjoy. It balances the heavy nature of the final piece.

BOWIE: Do you have a clear vision of how you’d like to render your subjects going in, or do the details present themselves in the process?

SILIUS: I am quite clear with the vision I have for the final piece but sometimes the mistakes or accidents that occur are the most joyous part of the process and final piece. The details have to be malleable as I don’t know everyone’s body. They are all so unique, so I have to think on the spot how to account and adjust for these occurrences. Also some people are self-conscious about certain aspects of their body so being respectful of this is also important, and I sculpt and stylize certain parts so I and my subjects are happy. It's a collaboration, always.

BOWIE: Aside from making sculpture, you also have a formidable practice as a makeup artist. You even sometimes apply makeup to your sculpture. Do these practices inform one another at all?

SILIUS: I have been working as a makeup artist for twenty years now. I started in prosthetics and special effects, moved into theater, opera, tv, film, and finally into fashion and beauty. For me, the sculpture and applying makeup go in a complementary tandem, as adding makeup onto the bodies and faces is always applied by me in a sculptural way. I will sculpt the body with color or textures like gloss and shadow effects so that sections with a matte finish blend and melt into a dry section. I move around the piece or the person imagining how it will be viewed at every angle. I know faces and bodies quite well and appreciate the individual nuances each one has every time.

Holly Silius. Mr. Wash, 2022. Bronze and steel.

Holly Silius. Penny Slinger, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

BOWIE: As a makeup artist, It’s your job to project a character onto your subjects that they may not immediately see, but that they may have a natural ease in accentuating. Is this something you find easy to do with yourself?

SILIUS: Creating illusions for beauty, to tell a story or to create a character from whoever I am working with is like a fantasy or dress up. People are very concerned with protecting their image, even more so when they have bad taste, so to encourage an idea onto them is sometimes challenging until they trust you. Personally, I don’t create a character for myself, I am just myself and I have evolved like a sculpture can evolve with age, my ideas and taste changes and the way I present myself changes with confidence and with credibility.  

BOWIE: How did this particular body of work come together at Central Server Works?

SILIUS: I met Joshua who owns CSW through a shoot with George Clinton for Autre, he curated George’s show at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. I proposed to cast George’s face for the shoot and Joshua got to know my practice more. The accumulation of faces and bodies in stone, resin, metal and wax from the last few years in my studio led me to making six new bronze pieces to go alongside the older works. Then, I added a couple of new casts with artist friends Langley Fox and Penny Slinger, who we had mutually wanted to cast for a while, but I was waiting for the right moment to capture them for the perfect presentation.

Holly Silius. Langley Fox, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

Holly Silius. Melt me, 2024. Wax, wick, and twig.

BOWIE: What’s next for you?

SILIUS: I have so many ideas of sculptures I want to make, including some 3D-printed body pieces I made in 2021 inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe that I want to dismantle and take molds of, then re-purpose the design with bronze or steal, weld parts together and use the blow torch for an oil slick color effect. I got really into the blowtorching. I also have this idea to make huge, 3D sculptures of environmental figures using ocean waste plastic. I need a sponsor for this one and I already wrote to David Attenborough to see if he wanted to be involved. I’m also thinking of experimenting with AI as a more financially conscious way to explore my ideas, trying to embrace the technology aspect of that.

I Wanna Be Adored is on view by appointment through May 18 @ Central Server Works 517 Victoria Ave Venice, 90291

 

Holly Silius. Holly, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

 

Interreality Modalities: A Conversation with Artist Mieke Marple on Bridging the Digital and Traditional Worlds

Alida Sun, Southern Gothic Love Letters to My NSA Agent, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White


interview by Coco Dolle

NFT Tuesday LA co-founder and former Night Gallery co-owner, Mieke Marple is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer determined to navigate what she calls the “insurmountable chasm” between the physical and digital art worlds. 

In her passionate mission to reconcile both the analog and the digital, Mieke has recently curated an impressive exhibition titled Interreality, showcasing 35 artists from the pioneering digital space mixed in with traditional established artists. Produced by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR for Artists, Interreality is simply a tour de force. 

A kindred spirit and peer curator, I was thrilled to interview Mieke to speak about the exhibition as we tackled notions of provenance, embodied experiences, collecting art and feminism. 

COCO DOLLE: The recent groundbreaking exhibition at LACMA, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age was enlightening on the symbiotic formation of tech and art. Tell us how your curation took inspiration from this show and about how it led to the making of Interreality.

MIEKE MARPLE: This exhibition was such an important moment in the digital art community, with the legacies of computer-based art, which had always been on the fringe before, finally getting canonized. These thematic, institutional shows are really important, but they can make artists feel sectioned off from the larger conversation and that's what I really wanted to do with this show. To have digital art be more seamlessly integrated with the larger, more mainstream conversation. 

DOLLE: Artists reacting to the world they're living in integrating new technologies with new tools. There was really no equivalent to this show in New York. Two years ago, MoMA had a drawing exhibition titled Degree Zero, illuminating new visual languages in midcentury art. I was extremely pleased to see works by Vera Molnar along with Louise Bourgeois. And what about your choice of venue, a 15,000-square-foot space strategically located near LACMA. Was it a raw space when you found it?  

MARPLE: Yes, it’s a hundred-year-old building. The owners recently gutted and retrofitted it and that's why it was available. It wasn't even rental ready. It didn't have outlets, or even real walls, or anything like that. But it's interesting to hear you say that this discourse with digital or computer-based art is further along in LA than New York. LACMA has definitely helped pave the way there. 

DOLLE: Yes they also hosted Paris Hilton spearheading a digital artwork fund by LACMA supporting women artists last year.

MARPLE: Yeah, totally. The other thing about this show is that I really wanted it to have a feminist umbrella, and besides just having feminist artists in the show, which is one way of doing that, I wanted to tell this story about artists from different generations who’ve influenced each other in a very non-linear and intuitive way.

DOLLE: So, who are you considering feminist artists in Interreality? Even if they don’t proclaim themselves as such, I believe the work of Oona is triggering deep conversations on body politics and the perception of women in society.

MARPLE: Alida Sun, I would say for sure. Connie Bakshi. I would say I'm a feminist artist. Jen Stark, Aya, Mark Flood, Cindy Phoenix identifies as a feminist artist. Ellie Pritz, of course, and Lindsey Price. Christine Wang, obviously. Aureia Harvey. I would say almost all of them. 

DOLLE: What about Claudia Hart?

MARPLE: Oh, yeah, of course, Claudia Hart!  

DOLLE: I love that it has this underlying statement, a feminist show in disguise.

MARPLE: I wanted it to be a feminist show, but I didn't want to do a show that's just women and non-binary artists. I did that already at Vellum LA when I co-curated Artists Who Code. I wanted to do a show that's just more inclusive. 

DOLLE: How did you bring all these artists together? From a curatorial standpoint, I work with artists I feel close to, their aesthetics and the conversation they engage with. It seems that you were also looking for a sort of balance.

MARPLE: I worked closely with Steve Sacks of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt of PR for Artists, who produced the show together. They brought a lot of artists they knew to the curatorial table. Even Savannah who works for Aubrie recommended a lot of artists that I ended up including. But yeah, I wanted there to be as many traditional artists as digital artists, as many women and/or non-binary artists as men. I wanted to pair artists with big social media followings like Jen Stark or Parker Day with artists that aren’t as well known. I wanted artists that were more established with more emerging artists. Abstraction with figuration. Slick with punk. Dry with wet and juicy. I feel like that's the main concept of the show: just a kind of harmony of modalities where nothing is super dominant over anything else.

DOLLE: What about embodied experience? You are showing artists engaged with new technologies and with a sensibility of the physical space but we're also looking at screens. So how do you put this together as experiential?

MARPLE: I would go to NFT shows and I would see all this work on the same size screen, the same orientation at the same height, and it would just homogenize the work. And then I would go to traditional art world shows, and there'd just be paintings. Just hung on the wall, and I would be like, does this really reflect reality? Is this really talking about the world I live in today? Because it doesn't feel like it. I think art's job is to be a sort of mirror to the world we live in so that we can have critical discussions about it. And then, having come from Night Gallery and putting on like a hundred shows and having worked with amazing artists like Samara Golden, who really knows how to create an experience in space, I wanted to put on a show where the installation was an art piece in and of itself.  

DOLLE: I love that. 

MARPLE: The show itself is an artwork. And then, there's artworks inside that larger artwork.

Mieke Marple, Dn't Ask Why, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

upside down iridescent purple heart sculpture wrapped in pink rope

Adam Parker Smith, Shibari Heart, 2022, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

DOLLE: It’s so important to be creative with the physical space when exhibiting digital works. I feel particularly NFT galleries need to be less linear and more creative with their presentation and aesthetics. Looking at screens in a white wall gallery space isn’t at all mesmerizing.

MARPLE: Just to explain that further, when I say the show itself is an artwork I mean that I want there to be something magical and seductive about every part of it. And also for every part of it to have a critical underpinning. For example, we used metal studs to create see-through walls and it's almost impossible to look at one work by itself. Whenever you're looking at a work, you're also looking through the wall and seeing the back of another work and some other works just feet away. It's emphasizing just how connected we are; how all the works are.

DOLLE: It sounds like a collage when we speak about it like that! 

MARPLE: Yeah, it's almost like a collage in a space made of multiple artworks. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right?  These artworks are almost literally overlapping each other in space and creating surprising moments and connections, and that’s really exciting. 

DOLLE: Are all the pieces for sale? 

MARPLE: Oh, yes. (laughs) It's a selling show. But you know, it is interesting that my partner, after he saw the show, he told me that it really felt like a biennial, which I thought was interesting. Maybe that's just the scale, but I think there's more to it than that. What’s interesting about survey shows is the concept is usually very, very broad if there is one, but basically it's just a kind of temperature taking. What kind of art are people making right now? And, I think that's what this show is too. It's taking the temperature of the art landscape … and not just in LA. There are some artists in New York, Chicago, Miami, in London, in Berlin, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Rome. So, it's pretty international.

DOLLE: What was the audience’s response? Was it a super LA scene? A more digital art scene? Any noticeable criticisms from the traditional art world?

MARPLE: At the opening, I would say there was more people from the digital art world than the traditional art world, which is definitely something that I want to change because I feel like the traditional art world is who could benefit most from exposure to this show. The other thing I noticed was, like, a lot of the work is more interactive. My pieces have AR. So does Lindsey Price’s, and you have to scan a QR code and use your phone to activate it. OONA’s was participatory. Alida Sun’s had a live digital sensor. So, there was a lot of participatory work, which goes hand in hand with the Web3 ethos, you know, where the line between artist and collector can get blurry, and co-creating is a very popular idea.

DOLLE: Artists and collectors are more hand in hand in web3, indeed. I have recently collected more works in web3 than in contemporary arts. 

MARPLE: Right, but I noticed that a lot of people were hesitant. There wasn't as much participation as I hoped. I was talking to Alida Sun after the opening and I just realized that people are so trained to have this passive relationship to art.

So many people expect art to behave like a painting, right? It hangs there. You sort of appreciate it and then you move on. There's not a lot of interaction, or co-creation, or anything. I just realized there has to be a lot more education around this, that art is more than paintings, and an audience’s relationship to art can be more than just a passive one. Alida reminded me that this is a movement, you know. It’s bigger than me or this show.

DOLLE: Yes, the human impulse. You understand the collector's psychology and its attachment to the uniqueness of non fungibility. With NFTs, digital art could finally have the same one-of-a-kindness as a painting. What about traditional art collectors? 

MARPLE: I think a lot of traditional art collectors are intimidated or wary of collecting digital art. I wanted to take away some of the intimidation factor by showing all the different kinds of work seamlessly side by side. I wanted to show where there was something for everybody. Like, maybe you would come in as a painting lover, but you would leave having seen your first painting with AR or digital work made with AI and that would expand your ideas about art. 

 

Auriea Harvey, Gray Matter III, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

 

Interreality, curated by Mieke Marple, is on view through November 25 @ The Desmond Tower 5500 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles with a special performance event, today, November 18 from 6-9 pm.

Wombs Beyond Bodies: Katharina Kaminski and Hanne Gaby Odiele on Intersex Creative Power


interview by Chimera Mohammadi

The iconography of fertility holds a timeless power over us. Our paleolithic Venuses defined this obsession, encapsulating fertility as a powerful force of creation, rooted in the divine feminine while remaining paradoxically universal. Intersex artist Katharina Kaminski expands upon this understanding in her new show, Womb, which embraces our individual potentials for transformation and innovation while interrogating our gendered ideas about fertility. As we find ourselves in the throes of a gender revolution, Kaminski reckons with the intersection of gender and creation in her abstractions of the womb: soft vessels fill the Sainte Anne Gallery, distilling the Venus to its core sense of creation and transformation. In recognition of National Intersex Awareness Day, Katharina comes together with intersex model and activist Hanne Gaby Odiele to discuss creating while Queer, finding community, and claiming ownership of the self in the wake of bodily alienation.

MOHAMMADI: How did you two learn about each other? What influence has your mutual discovery had upon each of you?

Katharina Kaminski: I met Hanne at a party in New York. Back then, I already knew that I didn't have a womb and ovaries because I had no period, had gone through surgery at fourteen years old, and had been under hormone replacement therapy since then. But I wasn't informed at all about my ‘condition’ and I thought something was wrong with me—that I was the only one. I felt victimized because doctors encouraged me to hide the truth about my body and didn't feel there was someone who understood enough to speak about it. I had been following Hanne on Instagram before personally meeting her. I read about her activism on intersexuality and I started suspecting, maybe I am intersex too! I started studying about it and all I was reading matched with me. So, I introduced myself to Hanne and said, “I think I might be intersex too!” A couple of weeks later, I went to do a blood test and solved years of uncertainty when I received the results that I have XY chromosomes. Thanks to Hanne, not only did I learn what it means to be intersex, and that there is a beautiful community of outspoken intersex people in the world, but she also inspired me to be proud of it. She gave me the information to understand and the inspiration to speak. 

Hanne Gaby Odiele: We met randomly at that party years ago. I think Katharina already messaged me before on social media right after my disclosure. After that, we kept in touch, and we met again when Katharina was spending some time in New York. We not only bonded over our intersex journey, but she also shared with me her passion for art and her newfound love for her sculptures. 

MOHAMMADI: Do you consider yourselves activists? 

KAMINSKI: I don't consider myself exactly an activist, but as an artist, there is a strong connection between my sculptures, the body and gender, which are issues that have been focal points in my life. If I have the chance to speak to many (like now), and there is someone else who can benefit from that, as I benefitted from Hanne being open about it, then I feel I have the responsibility to do so. 

ODIELE: I’ve done a lot of activism in the past, since it was important to me to tell my story and bring to light the irreversible, unnecessary, non-consensual surgeries that intersex children can be subjected to. I also wanted to point out that intersex bodies are beautiful and perfect just the way they are. Since my disclosure I’ve seen a lot of new intersex activists emerge. I’ve been focusing less on activism myself. For me, it’s also important that being intersex is just a small part of who I am: it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

MOHAMMADI: Kate Bornstein opens their radical 1994 book Gender Outlaw with the phrase “My identity becomes my body, which becomes my fashion...” Has modeling informed your relationships with gender presentation, identity, and the way that many trans/genderqueer people’s feelings about their bodies range from mournful to celebratory? Odiele especially has spoken at length on their anger toward the medical policing of non-binary bodies. Has this complex emotional spectrum in relation to the body been a theme in your respective creative work?

KAMINSKI: Definitely! My sculptures have these alternative corporealities and I started doing that totally unintentionally. I feel my work is supercharged with that deep complex emotional spectrum. That's why I actually decided to present myself as intersex in connection to my work. Even though it doesn't define me, it is really present in who I am and in my art.

MOHAMMADI: In Man and His Symbols [1968], Jung describes the necessity of “the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth.” Did you experience the discovery of your intersex identities as a death and subsequent (re)birth? How did claiming your identities place the act of creation into your own hands?

KAMINSKI: More than discovering my intersex identity, what felt like a rebirth for me was allowing myself to feel fertile and whole.

MOHAMMADI: Does Womb anthropomorphize the womb or render it inanimate? Or might it do both?

KAMINSKI: I am more interested in the ‘womb’ as this energetic center where life and creativity are born, rather than its physicality. It's kind of ironic, because as a sculptor, you normally want to make your subject material, give it a form. In this case, I think because I’ve been going through the process of disconnecting from the feeling of lacking my physical womb, and connecting with my fertility beyond the matter of an actual organ, I wanted to explore deeper understandings of the embodiment of a womb. The exhibition at Sainte Anne Gallery has two floors: on the first floor I am presenting my sculptures for the first time in new mediums: marble and bronze. It’s a more brutalist side of my work and the biggest scale in which I have ever worked. On the second floor, after you walk up the stairs, you enter the Womb: a Light and Darkness installation with ten Light Sculpture Beings in different types of clay. It feels like being inside a sanctuary, or in the ‘womb’ of your mother.

Katharina Kaminski
The Womb (2023)
Clay + fire installation
200 x 180 x 150 cm

MOHAMMADI: Womb forges a non-biological definition for fertility. How does this understanding of fertility feed your creative instincts?

KAMINSKI: Fertility is not only about creating human life, it is about creating. The title of my exhibition is a metaphor for the inner plot twist I allowed myself. From feeling absent and infertile to a sense of abundance and fecundity.

MOHAMMADI: I was very interested in the term “surrealist body language” in Womb’s press release. Can you elaborate on what that means to you?

KAMINSKI: I'm very interested in the mysticism of creating. Through my creative process, I seek to connect with the unconscious. Like a womb, I offer myself as a portal from the spiritual to the physical and I allow the sculptures to become alive. I think the concept of ‘surrealist automatism’ resonates a lot with my way of creating. I find it unnatural to start a sculpture from a thought in the mind, wanting to predict and control a result. I find it uncomfortable and boring. The mind is limited. I'm more interested in going beyond that, where emotions are raw and free and the mind can't comprehend. So for me, creating is a ritual, or a dance between me and the clay that allows the sculptures to become alive in their own unique enigmatic corporealities.

MOHAMMADI: What media exploring non-binary identity do you find particularly meaningful?

ODIELE: I love the art of drag and performance. I think it has helped me accept many contradictions and perceptions I had about gender. Like a wise queen likes to say, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”

Womb is on view through December 20th at Sainte Anne Gallery, 44 rue Saint Anne, 75002, Paris.

Cultivating a Circular Practice: An Interview of Louise Frances Smith

Louise Frances Smith
Collect install Assemblage no1 oyster shells, 2023 (detail)
mixed media including clay and crushed oyster shells
photograph by Yeshen Venema



interview by Lara Monro



In the context of art history, sustainable ways of creating have been around since the birth of conceptual art in the 1960s. Take German artist, Nils-Udo, whose plant creations placed in nature were left to develop and subsequently disappear as a way of commenting on the links between nature and humanity. Today, as we are faced with the sobering realities of humankind’s impact on the planet, environmentally-conscious art forms are becoming increasingly widespread. By working with found objects, natural and upcycled materials, and through processes that intentionally avoid damage to the Earth’s resources, artists are using their creative expression to highlight environmental degradation and the stark reality of climate change. 

Margate-based artist Louise Frances Smith worked mainly with clay until she became increasingly concerned and frustrated with the unsustainable plastic packaging used to store her medium of choice. After conducting considerable research, it became clear to her that it was not possible to naturally source clay from her local area, so she decided to get creative and utilize what was available, better yet, she used what was in abundance: seaweed and oyster shells. Smith has spent the last two years collecting and experimenting with both as part of her newly adopted approach to creating sustainable work. 

This year, as part of Somerset House’s 2023 Collect, Smith exhibited Sargassum Tide, a new body of work that examines wireweed seaweed and Pacific oysters, two non-native species thriving on the UK coastlines due to climate change. She subsequently presented the series in a solo show at The Margate School where she facilitated workshops on how to work with sustainable materials in collaboration with community groups, families, and creative practitioners. 

In the following interview, Smith shares her journey with adopting a sustainable art practice, discusses the scientists, artists, and experts that have inspired her, and where she hopes to take her sustainable practice in the future.  

LARA MONRO: You began your creative practice working with clay to create sculptural works. What initially drew you to this medium? 

LOUISE FRANCES SMITH: My first encounter with clay was on my degree at Kingston University. It was a Fine Art degree so I took advantage of being able to play with different materials—I worked for a while with latex, paper pulp, drawing, and printing. Then in my third year, one of our visiting lecturers ran a clay workshop. After my initial frustration with this new medium, I quickly fell in love with it because you can do so much; I love its tactile qualities. There is so much scope when working with clay and the different stages of making—dipping in slip, adding glaze, creating textures, casting, carving, moulding, slab building, coiling, there are so many possibilities. I enjoy being able to combine clay with other materials too and I’m keen to continue exploring this in my work.

 

Studio portrait of Louise Frances Smith
photograph by Stuart Leech

 

MONRO: In recent years you have introduced sustainable, bio and found materials into your practice. Can you tell me about this development—what was the catalyst for the step change? 

SMITH: Covid and the 2020 lockdowns, a catalyst for so many things. My place of work was closed and I was very lucky that my daily walks allowed me to explore 15 - 20 minutes down the road to the Margate coastline. I’ve always been drawn to my surrounding landscapes and my work has been influenced by the coastline, but this was a deeper connection because it became a part of my daily routine. I made a body of work called Fragments of Isolation, Margate where I was starting to look closely at the patterns of the landscape, both natural and man-made, and making collages from photographs and drawings of my walks. When I started to translate these drawings into clay there was a disconnect when I was pulling clay out of a plastic bag. I knew this material (clay) came from the ground, but I didn’t know how to go about looking for it. After being successful in applying for Arts Council England ‘DYCP’ funding, I learned how to dig my own clay via two incredible tutors over zoom, Rosanna Martin and Nina Salsotto Cassina (Unurgent Argilla). I soon discovered there is no clay in Margate, so I started to look at what materials there were along the coastline and seaweed was one which is in abundance—this led to research into biomaterials. I was very inspired by a Material Matters podcast with Julia Lohmann, from The Department of Seaweed, who I was also lucky to have a mentorship session with. There are a lot of incredible artists and designers working sustainably who have inspired me to continue this journey in my own practice.

MONRO: What is your process for sourcing your found objects/materials? 

SMITH: I take a bag with me on my daily walks and pick up anything from the beach that I find intriguing—like a strange piece of rock or a beautiful shell. I also try to collect any litter I see when I’m doing this too; there are always fishing nets tangled in with seaweed. I don’t use any of this in my work at the moment, it's mainly the natural objects I use. I only collect seaweed that’s washed up on the beach, most found on Margate beaches can be collected from April to September (to allow nesting birds to take the seaweed over winter) but the seaweed I have recently been working with is an aggressive, invasive species (wireweed), so I have been allowed to collect that over winter months too. I make sure to shake it out before bagging it so I’m not taking any little critters home! 

I have also been collecting oyster shells from a local restaurant in Margate, Angela’s. They do not have a use for the shells after the oysters have been eaten so I go and collect them as a waste material to use.

MONRO: How do you incorporate these into your work—do they define how you create a new piece, or inform it? 

SMITH: I think it varies from material to material and what the idea of the work is in my head! I’ve recently learned about Material Driven Design through a brilliant bioplastics course run by Through Objects and Bonnie Hvillum (Natural Materials Studio). It was an interesting concept for me because I think sometimes I have an idea of what I want to make in my head (from my sketchbooks, research) and I’m looking for a way to do so. When you work with clay, you can get it to do so much, in a myriad of ways. Whereas when you work with a new material, it’s fun to experiment and play with what it can do and then bend your idea or concept to adapt with the material’s qualities.

There have been a lot of experiments that I haven’t been able to use. But then, I started to look at these fragments from my experiments and use this ‘waste material’ to make collage. I’m trying to keep a circular practice and consciously ensure there is no waste. So, to answer your question, it is both.

MONRO: Since adopting a sustainable creative practice what have been the most insightful lessons you have learned from being more environmentally conscious? 

SMITH: When I started looking at making my practice more sustainable, I was thinking about the materials I was using and how I was sourcing them, which is really important. But something I hadn’t thought much about was waste from my studio and making processes. There were techniques I was already using that I hadn't thought about but are very important: recycling clay and glazes, finding ways of using firing pieces to reuse in the work in some way. There are so many potters and clay studios who adopt these practices already but might not on the surface appear to have a ‘sustainable practice.’ Waste is the first thing to look at, and also if you can use someone else’s waste, then even better! There is a brilliant book called Wasted by Katie Treggiden that highlights a lot of artists using waste as a material in so many different ways and across different industries. Katie also says that it’s important to stay curious and that it’s okay to be imperfect, and I think that’s really great advice. No one is going to have a totally sustainable practice over night, so it’s all about making small changes and building on that. I am still on my journey, I know I will continue to make mistakes and that there is so much I can improve on. I’m excited to see where my line of enquiry takes me as I continue to embrace these changes. 

MONRO: You recently exhibited Sargassum Tide, a new body of work at Collect 2023. Can you tell me about the series? 

SMITH: The works in Sargassum Tide are made using wireweed seaweed (Sargassum muticum) and Pacific oysters (Magallana gigas). These are two non-native species currently thriving on the UK coastlines due to climate change. I wanted to make work that shows the repercussions of human intervention on our fragile coastal ecosystems through the materials. The inspiration for the works comes from epibiosis; the close interaction between two different organisms, the host organism providing an environment for the other which is attached to its living surface. 

Pacific oysters were introduced to the UK for farming in the 1970s. They brought with them wireweed seaweed which was thought to have been attached to the oyster shells. At the time it was believed that it would not flourish, but since the rise in sea temperature, these species can now bloom. My research has led me to conflicting evidence of whether these species are ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ which has been really interesting. I think what drew me to these materials initially, beyond the story of their arrival, was that they are currently in abundance on my local coastline and can be used. 

MONRO: In April you exhibited Sargassum Tide at The Margate School. Was it important for you to showcase the work within the local environment from which most of the inspiration and materials came? 

SMITH: Yes, very important. I was really excited about displaying the works at Collect 23, in such a beautiful ornate building, and to a new audience. But an important part of the project is to highlight the abundance of these materials locally. So it felt important to share what I had collected from the landscape with the local community in Margate. I would love to inspire others to use these materials that are in abundance on our local coastlines, or just to be aware of what is there—to look closer at our local environments. 

Louise Frances Smith
Collect install Assemblage no1 oyster shells, 2023 (detail)
mixed media including clay and crushed oyster shells
photograph by Yeshen_Venema

MONRO: You facilliated workshops on how to create sustainable art works using biomaterials as part of the exhibition at The Margate School with local community groups. Are you keen to pursue this educational element as part of your practice?

SMITH: The workshops I conducted were a combination of making works with biomaterials and also clay workshops where we explored texture, pattern, and shapes from the local coastline. Working with biomaterials requires a bit of extra health and safety precautions so it hasn’t been possible to run these for all of my workshops, but just starting to have these conversations with people and showing them what you can do with biomaterials is really important. I’m really keen to pursue this as part of my artistic practice, and to learn more about what local community groups would like to understand about how to create sustainable work. 

I am also working with a creative digital agency, Studio T, to create a new section of my website that I will update quarterly with interesting content for artists and makers on their journey to having a sustainable practice. So, there will be a recipe for something to make, an interview with another artist, and a short film about a material or process I use in my work. This has all been made possible by an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant I received at the end of last year. 

MONRO: Are there any materials you are interested in experimenting with moving forward? Perhaps there are places in the UK you would like to explore to take inspiration for new work?

SMITH: There are so many possibilities and so many materials to explore! I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of working with biomaterials. I think next, I would love to collaborate with other artists and biodesigners. I am very interested in the texture of the oyster shell pieces so I would like to continue on this and explore how far I can push the material in terms of scale. I still have a passion for clay. There are so many places over the UK where you can dig and process your own, so I would like to continue with this research in the future too. 

Suspended in Memory: An Interview Of Veronica Fernandez

text and photography by Shelley Holcomb

Standing in front of Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez’s paintings you may start to feel as if you’re part of a fever dream or someone else’s past life regression. They are raw and autobiographical, a place where the viewer is invited to float through fragments of extremely personal memories while being entertained by the various textures and materials Fernandez has thoughtfully arranged in each work. There are painterly aspects that divide you from reality, yet it still feels as if you're walking into someone else's actual space and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. 

The paintings are in essence a mapping of her family lineage, their struggles and their persistence captured through the lens of old photographs passed down from her grandmother. Through these photographs, Fernandez is navigating her own identity as it relates to her childhood and her closeness to family. She manipulates these images to tell a story of adolescence that most of us couldn’t comprehend and yet she finds strength in these memories, weaving them into a narrative about what it means to call somewhere home and to make a place for yourself. 

I visited Fernandez in her studio as she put the final touches on her first solo exhibition entitled When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow?  at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles.

SHELLEY HOLCOMB: To begin, can you give a bit more about your family background? And in what ways do you think it influences your work? 

VERONICA FERNANDEZ: My father is Dominican and Puerto Rican, and my mother is Bolivian, but I was raised by my father and I connect more with that side of myself most of the time. Although I grew up primarily in Jersey, I was also raised in Miami, where the majority of my family is from. A lot of the time, the vibrant colors of Miami can come through in my work, I think, from that tropical environment down there. I also think a lot about my grandma's garden, the wood and textured objects from her house, the fruits she grows, and the objects she has that have been passed down from different generations. My grandmother is a strong, proud Dominican woman, who taught me core values she learned from her mother as well. The narrative for the exhibition begins with my great-grandmother as a matriarch, it shows my grandma and my father as a child, to set up the start of my father’s upbringing, and then because we’re his offspring, we also see my cousins that all came from his family. 

A lot of my photographs from childhood take place in Miami, Jersey, or Virginia, where I was born in a naval hospital. There are objects that pop up in my work, for example, the Malta Goyas in the installation, a beverage my father was always drinking in the house, that is directly inspired by him, his family, and my upbringing. Throughout my work, there are hints at my identity trying to navigate itself and find pieces that were lost through that separation caused by us moving around so much.

HOLCOMB: At first glance, you seem to be juggling a lot of references and stringing together multiple narratives in this exhibition, can you tell me how it came to fruition for you? 

FERNANDEZ: This is one of the first paintings that inspired the show called “Take Shelter” and it’s of my own personal story, my family, and the many obstacles that we faced. It’s based on a photo of my family while we were living in a shelter, that was one of the things in my life that helped me to perceive how people are, their backgrounds, and the layers that can exist in everyone's lives. I wanted to make this painting that examines how people take up space and what makes the foundation for a home. The home becomes what it's made of and not the actual physical space.

The whole theme for all of them is about the specific ways in which people adapt to the experiences that they go through. My work is about people and how they engage with their environment, their experiences and their memories of them, and how they perceive them over time. My grandma gave me these photographs of her in her childhood, her mother, and my father when he was younger. Because I was raised by a single father, I saw firsthand the experience of someone struggling over time and having to adapt to their environment due to unfortunate circumstances and obstacles that they went through, so I wanted to use that kind of story.

HOLCOMB: We see your dad referenced a lot in these works, would you say he is the protagonist? 

FERNANDEZ: My dad is the thread that keeps the show together. In some of the scenes that don’t involve him, his spirit is still within the painting or the spirit of those that changed a generation. Hence the name of the show: When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow? And I refer to that by proposing the question of when you come into this space and you are immersed in all of these spirits that live in the paintings, like my father’s or my experience and what I’ve gone through, the emotions that carry through that, will you carry something with you? And I took the title from a bit of poetry I wrote, It talks about how people can just actually see each other, you know when you first meet someone you don’t really know the layers of what actually made them the person they are today and so it talks about that exchange of each other’s struggles, this clear understanding of where you came from. The writing started when I was creating the show and it’s me having this imaginary conversation with a person about what it would be like to actually see someone, not just existing in these spaces, but actually being seen and heard and understood. And I think when you’re going through obstacles like I had to in my life, you really just want to be understood. 

HOLCOMB: Images of children and the portrayal of adolescence seems to be a common motif you’re working with, what is your connection to this imagery? What do they signify to you?

FERNANDEZ: Children for me are very unpredictable and just naturally curious about the world. I think everyone who comes across a child and sees their actions, or the way they conduct themselves, imagines the type of person they might become or even reminisce about their own childhood, a time when they didn't think about the future, living only in the moment. I think a lot about how that time of our lives is such a fundamental aspect that starts paving the way to how we perceive the world around us and what shoes we eventually are meant to fill. I think about my own upbringing and seeing firsthand how difficult living can be, in general, growing up and having moments where even though you're at an age of a promising future, you kind of have these early negative feelings about the world and you have to push yourself to get past them, sometimes it can feel never-ending. I was lucky that despite all I've gone through I had my father constantly instilling in me that I was more than what we were going through. I think it weighs on me to think about those that didn't have that guidance or have been swallowed by the hurtful factors of their environments. When I think about children in my work they really reflect the unforeseeable future of people.

There’s a painting in the show called “Watch A Leader Cry” that hits the nail on the head when it comes to talking about young people having to take on roles they’re not prepared for. As I said, my father raised us as a single parent, there were many times that my siblings and I, when we were growing up, saw him down because of different situations. This particular instance references a memory I have of losing everything on a bus seat, the bus driving away, and seeing him crying, chasing it down. In that moment, you’re left standing there like okay, I guess I need to take on this new role of the leader because he’s withered down. It’s exaggerated by the flipped umbrella and all the groceries and him clearly being upset. That’s one of the paintings that’s very specific when it comes to those emotions of having to adapt, and children having to utilize what they have in order to help their parental figure. Those older siblings who always had to take the brunt of something that happened. 

 
 

HOLCOMB: The painting that stands out the most where children are featured prominently is in the work “Trust Fall”. There’s also the glaring red figure, which we see come up a lot in your work, what’s that about?

FERNANDEZ: Yes, this is where we see the chaos of all of the cousins together because everyone thinks they are the one that has control. All the kids are naively thinking they can catch this figure and it talks about the way that they take on roles they aren’t prepared for, they’re not necessarily even sure that they’re able to handle. There’s no one there guiding them, there’s a baby here wanting to jump, thinking he can participate as well, it circles in a broken Coca-Cola bottle, emphasizing danger and how there are all these kids in this one space naively thinking that they’re prepared to carry this weight. They all have their own different expressions and their own roles, some of them are impacted by the situation that’s happening and some of them are oblivious. 

For this painting, I wanted to emphasize that these red figures are people that stem from other generations and they’re navigating themselves, how to go about their lives, and exist in these spaces they’ve been put in. When I paint these red figures they’re signifying they are transformative figures in the works that get impacted, their futures get altered dramatically. Kind of like on a plane when there’s turbulence, those are what the red figures are, out of control and you don’t know what’s going to happen, they’re very unpredictable.

HOLCOMB: Something else I see a lot in this show and in previous work is the recurring image of bread, what does it symbolize in your work?

FERNANDEZ: Bread was something that I noticed at a young age was always so cheap, which meant you would have an abundance of it, whether it be those 3 for $1 rolls or a loaf of Wonderbread, it was always a sweet deal! When my family only had a few dollars we always bought bread or eggs. It was something we could manipulate to make different meals when we didn't have much. My dad used to make syrup or butter sandwiches, or toast as a snack. Bread, as mundane as it is, was an object that kept us full, notably when we lived in areas where we were living off the corner store and didn't have a car that could take us across town to get fruits or veggies. It wasn't necessarily the healthiest option but not everyone is given that choice. In many ways, human beings use whatever options they have and make the most out of it, especially when times are just hard.

HOLCOMB: We also see a lot of sports iconography in your work, the Yankee cap or the Jeter shirt, can you elaborate on your connection to sports and its importance in your work? 

FERNANDEZ: I always incorporate sports in my work in one way or another. I think, because I was raised by my father, the essence of boyhood is always present. My father put us in sports when he could, we were all always terrible, like the worst, but he was always there, being all passionate on the sidelines. My household was always sports and video games, I remember my father would play all his Yankee and Giants games really loud throughout the house, screaming at the TV. We used to gather in the living room every Monday and Friday for wrestling and it was our bonding time. We became obsessed with WWE and my sister and I would get all excited when women wrestlers came out! There are a few pieces in the show where you’ll see figures wearing jerseys or Yankee symbols. In my installation, I included these cutout baseballs under the chair legs to protect the feet of it, as you would see on elementary school desks, and related it to how that aspect of sports was a protective or nurturing outlet for our family. The older Panasonic TV plays a loop of three Yankee game clips from the years my siblings and I were born. My father told us those years were extra special because the Yankees had won the World Series all three of those years. I thought it was sweet when he chose those clips. To him, it was luck from us being brought into this world. The essence of my father's love for sports is very special to me, it makes me feel at home.

HOLCOMB: When you’re crafting the compositions for the paintings, is it the direct photo, or do you collage them together from different references? 

FERNANDEZ: Some of the pieces in the show are either from my memory, some of them are directly from old photographs and I just alter them. The paintings that I pull from my family photos are very authentic, it’s important to me to have a photo of these particular experiences. The paintings are very fluid in that way, they’re not something that’s concrete, like the photo exactly, they're all kind of head-spacey paintings. I tend to create spaces where the more you look at them, they just don't really come together. Like, it will never actually make sense and that comes from reflecting on these memories I’ve retained. We never see the experience the same way as we get older—they never stay the same. Memories can change and over time we perceive them differently. 

I wanted to make a show based on older photographs I had and have it chronologically start off with my grandma and the photos she gave me, those backstories of where I came from. So the paintings feature my grandmother and my great grandmother, then down the line, it goes into the story of my father, and then us, showing these different generations and the different roles they take on and how they find their place in each of these individual environments. How are they adapting to these spaces? How are they not just existing, but also living in the spaces? I want the viewers to have the feeling that these people are really living in these paintings. Sometimes people would think "Aw, those people that go through things like that, they must be so emotional,” but they are just everyday people who live their lives and they aren't as fortunate. They don't see their lives as sad all the time. I want people to feel like, these are just their experiences, they're not always miserable. 

 
 

HOLCOMB: I feel like you’ve brought a lot of sculptural elements into this show, is sculpture a new practice for you? What do these different objects mean to you? 

FERNANDEZ: It’s a brand new thing I’m doing. In the show we see these laundry carts, you know the ones, you see them everywhere. I wanted to have something that was very universal. I feel like everybody has seen these at one point or another. I also wanted to add items that would touch people in a familiar way, like throw blankets with Mickey Mouse on them, Winnie the Pooh, like pop culture figures that everyone can relate to. These kinds of everyday objects you can associate with childhood or a domestic setting. I have this one memory of when we had to walk all the way across town to get to the laundromat just to do laundry. We would have to walk all the way there and all the way back with loads of laundry, so I just associate them with a form of labor. 

A lot of the sculptures I have in the show have a sense of human touch and human labor behind them. Like, for example, the sculpture "For Bread and Eggs," it's a stocking getting twisted in order to make a design to make this garnished item, to make yourself at home. There's that human touch and this work that's put into making and creating these items. The entire design on that chair in the installation was made by hand. I was originally going to get a chair that was the same design as the one I saw in an old photograph that I had, it was a striped satin chair, but then I decided to make the pattern by hand because I feel, much like the paintings, that I want to have this presence of the artist there. This body of work means a lot to me, so, I'm just really excited to show it.

When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow? is on view through Jul 17 at Sow & Tailor 3027 S Grand Ave

Moving Past Giants: An Interview Of Devon DeJardin

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Devon Dejardin’s exploration of art may have started from the humble encouragement of a sugar daddy psychic, but it has grown into a journey of healing and reflection that continues to drive his success in the art world. Within his cubist-influenced style of work, Devon Dejardin, an LA-based painter, processes through the elements of life demanding answers to all of its most urgent lingering questions. Dejardin employs his work as a way to unpack and understand the entropic nature of the universe through his lens of belonging, going deeper into the storms he's faced that brought him to the clear sky of his creation. This 29-year-old, self-taught artist originating from Portland juggles depression and anxiety within the creative realm and expresses his gratitude for the therapeutic release his art supplies to himself and its viewers. His newest project, Giants dives into this preconceived idea of spirituality and shifts its narrative to his ideas surrounding the guardians of the world, those that protect, aid, and grow in strength and vulnerability within the boundaries of our world. His art, huge in size, mimics the ideas of giants and how they are commonly perceived, yet it develops further than that. These feelings, or challenges in life, such as sadness or grief materialize as giants, but represent the deception life can have on us all. We sat down with this artist to explore his influences, conceptions around his work as a whole, and his first New York solo exhibition at Albertz Benda.  

AUTRE: We live in an age of anxiety and uncertainty—you are an artist who found refuge in painting, how has your adolescent experience with anxiety and now as a painter prepared you for our current zeitgeist? 

DEVON DEJARDIN: It taught me that sometimes we need to go to dark places in our life to gain a better understanding of ourselves and our place in this world. Anxiety and painting both can create times of uncertainty. However, if you continue to push and wrestle with what is in front of you, oftentimes beauty is birthed. I almost feel times of anxiety have become a guardian for me. It slows me down, humbles me and redirects me … very similar to the process of creating a painting.

AUTRE: Are you hopeful about the future or is there a sense of pessimism? 

DEJARDIN: Always hopeful. Pessimists are depressing to be around. Even in the worst of things there is so much good. So much of life has to do with perspective and looking at situations from all different angles.

AUTRE: Your work utilizes a lot of abstract forms, it’s almost cubist, but also extremely reflective of our 21st-century digital age, how would you describe these forms?

DEJARDIN: So much of our current physical reality is constructed by a few simple shapes that are altered and manipulated to form structures. We see these shapes in architecture, art, design, nature etc. When approaching this series of work I wanted to use these simple shapes to create something powerful. To show how the manipulation of simple constructs can form something that speaks and carries weight. The idea that simplistic forms can carry a complex identity.

AUTRE: Do you feel like the forms in your paintings are ominous or do you see them more as benevolent entities? 

DEJARDIN: I think that if you look at history much of the benevolent entities we have learned about are described to be quite ominous. To answer the question, I see both. Many religious texts speak on the idea of an entity saying “fear not” before they reveal themselves. Why? I think encountering any sort of spiritual being … light or dark … would be pretty intimidating.

AUTRE: Do you dream about unrealized paintings or imagine them before the paintbrush hits the canvas, or is it an intuitive experience?

DEJARDIN: Yes and no. There are many times where it is a free flow battle aimlessly moving paint until a picture appears. However, I tend to lean more towards a controlled intuitive process. A process where sketching, creating studies, and spending time thinking give way to a much more intimate painting. I find myself lately really enjoying the process of drawing before painting. Reimaging the same painting multiple ways.

AUTRE: Your new work that will be on view at Albertz Benda is inspired by spiritual allegory, when and why did you become interested in this subject matter? 

DEJARDIN: From a young age I was always interested in the concepts of “where did we come from?” and “what is next?” Spirituality or religion are primary disciplines for investigating the boundary questions of life and death, of love and hate, that characterize the human condition. All persons crave for self-transcendence in one mode or another. Religious Studies provides the opportunity to understand, with depth and nuance, the many beliefs and rituals that move persons to appreciate the alternative world of reality. I think it is important to have a strong understanding of the major concepts humans use as a framework to exist…

AUTRE: Can you talk a little bit about the parable of David and Goliath and how that fits into your new work? 

DEJARDIN: Much of this exhibition stems from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013 book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. This book was an investigation into the relationship between underdogs and giants.

In the book, Gladwell discusses a story from the Bible about David and Goliath. The Israelites were in war with the Philistines, but they were at a disadvantage to win because of the champion, Goliath. Goliath suffered from acromegaly which made him a physical giant and no one wanted to fight him. However, David stepped up to fight him even though he didn’t think he could defeat Goliath. We learn that due to Goliath's growth disorder he suffered from many physical ailments such as vision impairment, lack of coordination etc. making David, a slinger, a much more evenly matched opponent. David was easily able to defeat Golith even though the odds seemed to be against him. The simple lesson is that often these “Giants” in our lives often are not as “big” as they seem. The work in this exhibition tells the story of pushing through and ultimately moving past “Giants” in our lives. 

AUTRE: You are displaying some large sculptures at the new show—can you talk a little more about these sculptures and the materiality, and what has the experience been going from two dimensions to three? 

DEJARDIN: I've always wanted my work to be able to be seen in all different kinds of settings and landscapes. Painting is limited to primarily being able to be indoors but I think there's so much power in allowing work to be placed in all different types of environments. These sculptures created for the show are made of bronze and will be able to live in earth's elements for hundreds of years. 

The experience going from 2D to 3D is something that I'm still learning. I'm being mentored and taught. I'm working alongside people that are far more experienced than I am at sculpting and it is a process that takes many hands. The process goes from taking an original sketch, making it into a painting, and then I bring it into a 3D format on the computer to envision what these paintings would look like from all angles. For me, that's the tricky part because all of my paintings and portraits are forward-facing. Taking on a side angle or the back angle and creating balance within that has been the most time-consuming part of it.

AUTRE: When you are working in the studio, do you have something that jump-starts the creative process—do you listen to music, is it a solitary experience or do you like to have a lot of activity? 

DEJARDIN: For four years I painted alone and most of the time without music. I found solitude to be a form of therapy and the time alone helped me start to better understand my place in this world. It allowed me to gain a better sense of my voice. Now, I enjoy the communal aspect of having people in and out of the studio. I like to bounce ideas and break up my thought patterns in hope that more ideas will come forth. I think we as humans are designed to be in community with one another and I'm starting to see a much more healthy balance with how I approach my work.

AUTRE: A lot of your new show explores misrepresentations, but what about you as an artist—are there things that people get wrong about your work or you as an artist? 

DEJARDIN: I am sure there are many misrepresentations about me and my work floating out there. It is not something that I need to focus on. My work is a reflection of my truth and my identity. I am responding to an innate pull to create and to share ideas with the world. If people want to twist, pick, and misinterpret … all are welcome. 

 
 

Devon DeJardin: Giants is on view June 30 - August 5 @ Albertz Benda 515 W 26th Street New York

Acrobatics Over Beats: A Conversation Between Torkwase Dyson and Derek Fordjour 

TORKWASE DYSON In your work, there are so many different movements. I’ll say acrobatics. To quote Brand Nubian a little bit, “acrobatics over beats.” 

DEREK FORDJOUR I really like the notion of the acrobatic. As you talk about the dexterity of bodies and being pushed, I think about the presence and absence of bodies in your work. This is really a big part of my attraction to your thinking and your work as it relates to mine, is the absence of the depiction of the body, but your keen awareness of bodies in space. I wanted to know from you: where is the body centered in your thinking absent from depiction of the body?  

DYSON Well, I understand consciousness to be experienced through the body, in this form as a human, right? As a human, sentient being, consciousness exists because of the body. And then the history of consciousness, liberation, Black liberation specifically, I understand that the brain and the mind are doing things that the body then follows, or catches up with, or responds to. What that does is that puts into ways of thinking and moving around instinct, around perception, around ideas of logic. I was thinking the other day about the differentiation between perspective and space. For me they’re indelibly tied; there’s no absence of the body ever. So, when the work is functioning, when I’m really functioning at a high level in the studio, when I’m drawing, when I’m painting, when I’m making sculpture, I am aware that the body is a place for my consciousness, and my consciousness is a place to understand past, present, and future, and that Blackness, in particular, is a condition of consciousness first for me. 

FORDJOUR And consciousness is a product of the mind it seems. When you think about the brain versus the mind, and for you, does Blackness also exist in this realm? 

DYSON Consciousness is something that happens between the brain and the mind in the human form. So you have the brain, which produces a consciousness. The brain, to a degree, is measurable. The consciousness is something that is indeterminable, that is formless. When we’re thinking about Blackness and being, and understanding those things, our experiences with body and mind are inextricably tied to the history of becoming Black, becoming human, becoming present. So, these things aren’t separate. 

FORDJOUR I love the idea that there is never an absence of the body, that the body is always present. I was thinking about how drawing, to me, is very connected to thinking. It’s almost a form of thought mapping. I think drawing in your practice plays a significant role, whether it’s the drawn line or actual mapping/graphing. I thought about the fact that I use lots of charcoal—that’s how the work begins ... the drawn line, which is a form of consciousness as well. When you talk about the expansiveness of consciousness and how it is ultimately indeterminable, the vastness of potential at the beginning of a drawing, the openness of possibility, is what we are attracted to...potentiality. I really think alot about the role of drawing. I am aware of your practice of making a multitude of small studies and expanding the possibilities of line—I’m now thinking about that gesture as evidence of thought, and a kind of stream of consciousness. Do you think about drawing related to consciousness or thought? 

 

Torkwase Dyson
Distance, Distance (1919: Black Water), 2019
Acrylic, metal, ink, and gouache on wood
(diameter 98 inches/ 248.9 cm)
©Torkwase Dyson.

 

DYSON Remember when we were at the Graham Foundation and you participated in the drawing workshop, and you were drawing with chairs, and you were putting chair legs through pieces of paper, and you were making marks on them? Drawing in the expanded field is that kind of action where mindfulness, thought, improvisation, thinking through equation takes place. The act of the brain thinking one plus two equals three is different than just thinking of the number three, right? Those kinds of ways in which the mind and brain are capable of both linear thought, and instinct, and expression around knowing are always operational when drawing. When you’re in the studio, and you’re making, you can set yourself up for both. You can set yourself up to understand an equational theory. You can understand a kind of mathematical abstraction with geometry. You can set yourself up to understand the curvilinear and the rectilinear in an equation. You can also set yourself up for improvisation. You can set yourself up for ways of knowing through the body in a kind of immediacy. These capabilities are, if we think about understanding as a dialectical experience, then everything kind of goes. It’s those kinds of ways of working that put you in a position to exhaust the possibility of a form. 

FORDJOUR As you talk about the possibilities of setting up a kind of calculus in the studio, I think about your legend of shapes (box, bell, curve, etc.) I really loved that you not only had this legend, but you made it available for viewers. This could have remained limited to process or part of your enigmatic thought restricted to the studio, but you also made it available in the wall text. Was the creation of this legend, the genus of the work? Did you start with those elements, or did you react to the works and sort of discern patterns and then extract this legend? Did you ever have any concern about how people might apply it to reading the work in that it could become possibly reductive? 

DYSON Well, I don’t know if it works like that. First and foremost, I’m interested in, as a reductive kind of phrase, environmental liberation—the future of it, the past of it, and the history of it. I needed to, in my studio, create, I’ll call it a Black and eloquent equation to think about the strategies and the methodologies behind those futures. Because I believe it is the essence of those liberating acts in combination with the reality of indigenism that is going to save our future. The work is only about me thinking through that and making objects so that I can be in that conversation consistently and insistently, there is a level of comprehension around those possibilities that make me feel alive, and that regard all those histories as living histories, and regard the future of the human race as something that is unfixed and constantly changing, and for more improved living conditions. One doesn’t come before the other, I don’t think. I’m just trying to get at these things. Maybe they came at the same time, I don’t know, but what I landed on for that show is a solitary form. The curve, the triangle, and the 90º angle is where I started years ago, and now I’ve created a single form that I believe is my own. The trapezoid in relationship to the circle creates a trapezoidal prism and a volume. When I was, rightfully so, using the history of Black liberation politics to discover myself in the world and have conversations, I now landed on a form that, in itself, I can insert things in. Do you know what I mean? 

FORDJOUR Oh, absolutely. I want to go back to a point in an exchange we had this past summer. I asked you about Afrofuturism, and you gave a flat rejection of the presence of that kind of aspiration in your work. We don’t have to talk specifically about Afrofuturism, but this notion of futurity as something optimistic and hopeful. There’s always this kind of vacillation between historical precedent and events and also a sense of propositions for the future in your work. I would like to know whether your understanding of the idea of futurity, particularly how it emerges in your work, whether questioning or even conjuring it—is optimistic? 

DYSON I don’t work in those terms, I guess another flat rejection. I recognize them as ideas—propositions that other people use to move forward, but I think about ideas of impermanence, creativity, invention, and advancement. When I meditate, I think about change, and I think about advancement, I think about ancestors, I think about the specter, I think about horror, I think about peace—I think about these things, so I don’t use those phrases because...I don’t know why. 

FORDJOUR Because they’re limiting? 

DYSON Maybe not. Maybe they’re not limiting. I just entered this idea of the future through a different door. I entered a door through someone like Roscoe Mitchell, so when I see Roscoe Mitchell set up, ready to go, I don’t think about hope. I think about preparation, I think about skill, I think about risk, I think about transformation, and it gives me a feeling of velocity, and I know that things are always moving and expanding. 

 

DEREK FORDJOUR
STRWMN, 2020
Acrylic, charcoal, cardboard, oil pastel and foil on newspaper mounted on canvas
85 x 65 inches (215.9 x 165.1 cm)"
Image courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery

 

FORDJOUR This is how you approach… 

DYSON That conversation about Afrofuturism. Thinking about your work—I want to know what you think about imagination, and invention, and aspiration, and collective being. How do those things operate in your work?

FORDJOUR I really think about how inventiveness is a necessary aspect of the Black condition. To be an under resourced, largely oppressed people, or at least, people navigating the conditions of oppression, invention becomes a strategy for survival. As it pertains to my work, there is some degree of an element that might be read as whimsy, or a hint of the preternatural or the magical, the carnivalesque, which kind of pushes toward a kind of spiritual dimension. I’m really aiming at that sense of wonder around invention, and it happens for me in very practical terms when I encounter systems of oppression. Even prisons for example, how there’s an ecosystem within that system of oppression that can create all this contraband of many sorts that then has an economy. But then when I go to South Africa and go through a township and find out that there’s some sort of drug that’s been created by rubber in a lantern, and this other thing that creates another sub economy. I’m really interested in how—around the world, in order to thrive under oppressive conditions, people become inventive. We must become educated bodies, Black bodies in institutions, and still interested in liberation, and negotiating all the things that come with that. I think in this body of work, to more or lesser degrees, that sense of whimsy is reaching for that inventiveness that is a magical dimension that I associate with Black culture. 

DYSON Just thinking about the installation that I’ve seen of yours—I’ll bring up the specter again—where there’s an amalgamation of the meta, the exact, the specter, the in-between, the acrobatic, the practical, the mystical, but also this idea of the indeterminable, and a real sense of time in your work as well. I was thinking about one of your animatronic devices that circles, spins, and lights and moves, and the sense of time that it takes and steadiness that it takes to create a genius movement, to create something that’s at the edge of its absolute possibility. There’s something about your work that happens in that space without leaving behind the history and the terror of the carnivalesque—Black history specifically, and global history more generally. I’m really, really fascinated with each of your projects, how you continue and have a fidelity to the mechanistic while holding onto the quotidian. I know that in a few short years you’ve made these leaps and bounds. I’m super excited to see where it all continues to grow. The rigor in your practice really shows within experimentation, and invention, and materiality.  

 

Torkwase Dyson
I Am Everything That Will Save Me (Bird and Lava), 2020
acrylic and string on wood
36'' diameter
© Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
Photography by Kris Graves

 

FORDJOUR Very much in materiality and the haptic, right? 

DYSON The haptic, yes. 

FORDJOUR The haptic as a way in. I think that the paintings now are much more active, that the figures are more animated. I haven’t really depicted much action, but I really wanted to respond to this sort of social action moment in which we currently live--this moment of activation around election, responding to death, and images of them, and all of the excitement even in young people around addressing the Black condition in a way that I have not seen in my lifetime--this convergence of social action. And there’s always been liberation work, there’s always been work toward revolution, but this sort of crystallizing moment where it’s at the fore and goes beyond the bounds of our community conversations, and now there seems to be a world community that’s motivated around Black liberation and seeing these things come to the fore. There’s an activation, and I really have wanted to have work that felt invigorated and that would probably explain the move toward the acrobatic. 

DYSON And pushing against fascism. 

FORDJOUR Certainly. Listen, absolutely. Honestly Torkwase, fascism was a theoretical idea or far off political concept for most of my life. It was something I accessed through  literature and learning. It was merely another form of government, but to experience that, to live it, to understand it, and to feel the anxiety around danger for bodies in a governmental system and that kind of thing—this is the first time I’ve really experienced that so keenly. The acrobatic—which is a great way to describe some of the physicality and the gesturing that happens with my figuration. It is the acrobatic toward a kind of discomfort and a contortion, a contorting within, thinking about the edges of the picture plane and activating portraiture or bodies. Some moments, of course, are very still, but I have moments that go in the direction of action, and I think it is informed by our moment of political action and awareness. One of the things I really appreciate about you as an artist, but also as an educator is your vast knowledge and appreciation of a multiplicity of practices. You are not an abstract painter. It is far too reductive for you. You are able to really plug into practices of a variety of modes, and your understanding of what’s happening in figurative work, my work, and my deep understanding of what’s happening in your work, but we fall into different categories, the objective and unobjective—I want to know about your relationship to figuration. You started from the mechanics of drawing, originally. You really refused this splintering that happens around figuration and abstraction. But I wanted to just hear you talk about your relationship with the figurative. 

DYSON In this moment of activation, and as you talk about witnessing firsthand, or being in close proximity to fascist, racist violence, brings us to a different kind of kinship of systems of global oppression. In thinking about the exhibition Freedom Principles, these are the principles which I am operating under, where there’s nothing too far, there’s nothing too distant, we’re all in this condition of the relational, and we’re all in this condition of consciousness together. Now there are registers of closeness, like my closeness to immediate death and violence. Am I far from what it means to have my child kidnapped from me and then held in cages? The politics of the human body are never without question, whether we’re talking about figuration or non-representation, or kinds of concrete abstraction, or didactic abstraction, all of these things are in consideration in terms of the way that I think about artmaking between the mind and the body. 

FORDJOUR I’m so happy you have a piece, by the way. 

DYSON Yeah, it’s right over there. You see it? 

FORDJOUR That’s like the first sculpture I ever made. 

TORKWASE DYSON Could you talk about your upcoming show? 

DEREK FORDJOUR I had a year knowing that I was going to do this show. I spent a long time thinking about it before actually doing anything. There’s a collaboration where I’m working with a puppeteer, Nick Lehane, so that required lots of meetings. I was also learning about the art form of puppetry, which I enjoy. And then there were sculptural elements that are happening in different places, due to Covid, which required thinking, fabrication, and various processes. I waited until those things were happening before the painting began. I found that the aspects of learning and the collaborative work helped activate many of the ideas I had been processing before. I had this list of painting ideas that was constantly evolving, but it wasn’t until I had these other things to react to that I really found an entry point. I probably work best extemporaneously, so maybe I was just creating the conditions for that kind of energy. 

 

Torkwase Dyson
Space as Form: Movement 1 (Bird and Lava), 2020
acrylic on canvas
40-1/4" x 48" (102.2 cm x 121.9 cm)
© Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
Photography by Kris Graves

 

DYSON Can you talk about the title Self Must Die? I want to talk about code, I want to talk about autonomy, and I want to talk about presentation. Can you talk about the title? 

FORDJOUR Two things really brought this about. One, I was thinking a lot about death this year because I have been so proximate to it, just people struggling with how to pull off a funeral at this time, so there is the literal loss of life, people actually dying, this year. I also have a close relative who is dealing with a terminal illness, I have a son who is a twenty-two-year-old college student in Atlanta that was in the streets when protests were happening, and I watched two young people from the college he attends get dragged out of a car and tased violently by a mob of officers in riot gear, so thinking about his vulnerabilities as a young Black man at twenty-two years old. Also my father is in his mid-seventies, so as we think of end-of-life issues, I kind of sought safety in the middle, but then I realized that I am the same age as George Floyd at the time of his vicious murder. So I’ve been thinking about death in all these ways—the funerary, the absence of the funerary, living in the wake of death and also a very necessary ego death. 

 

DEREK FORDJOUR
Pall Bearers, 2020
Acrylic, charcoal, cardboard, oil pastel and foil on newspaper mounted on canvas
100 x 72 inches (254 x 182.9 cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery

 

Ayako Rokkaku: The Spirit Of The Artist

 
 

interview by AUTRE
photographs by Roman Maerz. Courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, London, Seoul and Vienna.

The large, expressive eyes peering out from Ayako Rokkaku’s paintings seem to mirror the viewer, as her work inevitably evokes a sense of wonder and joy that beckons the gaze. The self-taught artist paints using her bare fingers and hands to layer the figurative and the abstract in clouds of color, resulting in dynamic, imaginative imagery that draws from impressionism, abstract expressionism, and the kawaii aesthetic of Japanese manga. We spoke with Rokkaku about her inspirations, her practice, childhood, and her new works which will be shown at Frieze LA, presented by König Galerie.

As a self-taught artist, when did you realize that working with your fingers and hands helped you produce your painterly, impressionistic visions on canvas? 

When I was 20 years old and when I hadn't got my style yet, I participated in an event in Tokyo for amateur artists for the first time. I did live painting there. I prepared some materials (brush, pen, crayon, paper, etc) and tried some methods of painting. I was painting on the used cardboard on the floor with acrylic paint on my hand and it came to me. I felt that I was able to leave a trace of something like an improvisational and primitive impulse on the cardboard and it fit me well.

Your paintings are fully realized and mature, but there is a very childlike freedom to them. Did you paint when you were a child and what did you paint or draw? 

I liked drawing when I was a child, and I remember I liked putting colors more.

It feels fun when the paper gets vivid and lively as I put more colors on it. But it was after I grew up when I started to look carefully and think more about children’s drawing. I’m trying to keep the impression of pureness and freedom like children’s drawing in my works.

Who are some Japanese or international artists that inspired you growing up?

I’m impressed by Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. I also like Monet, Klee, Matisse, etc…

There has been a tradition of artists painting as performance. For instance, Yves Klein — is there a particular difference between painting in front of a crowd versus the solitary environment of a studio? 

I'm happy to be able to share the time and process when a painting is born, not only a finished work with the people there. It makes me feel like I'm drawing with the energy of the people there. And it is fun for me, by continuing to paint without thinking too much and without fear of failure in a limited time, sometimes unexpected techniques and motifs are born. On the other hand, when painting alone in the studio, it feels like playing — catching the energy ball between the canvas and myself.

Do you see yourself following in a similar trajectory as the Superflat artists of post-war Japan, or do you categorize your work in a totally separate arena? 

I've never been conscious about it. Maybe I’m in the trajectory, but personally, I don’t feel I’m in any group.

 
 

What have artists like Takashi Murakami taught you about painting. Is there a particular lesson that sticks with you? 

When I was 24 years old, Takashi Murakami invited me to join the Kaikaikiki booth in the Volta art fair in Basel. At that time he taught me that just liking painting is not enough to survive in the contemporary art world, and how he is fighting so hard with keeping the spirit of the artist. He never taught me about any technical things, but without him I might not have chosen to continue as an artist.

Do you see your work changing over the years—becoming more or less impressionistic, or abstract, or have the colors evolved?

It is getting less improvised, part graffiti-like, and the number of colors and layers has been increasing. Before, concrete figures such as girls and abstract parts were often more clearly separated. Nowadays, sometimes there is a girl behind the abstract layer, or the skirt or hair are directly continuing to the flow of clouds, so the border between abstract and object is becoming less. I think that the intention to create upward and free energy in the works has not changed.

How has Japanese anime and manga inspired your work? You have recurring symbols, like clouds and childlike figures. What do these figures represent?

It was not uncommon that anime, manga, and something cute (kawaii in Japanese) were more or less blended into daily life throughout my childhood in Japan. Cute characters, or characters with a strong and gentle heart, can be close to any person's heart. We can synchronize with them and they will lead to various new worlds. I maybe want to make the girl, the clouds, or abstract shapes as a way of expanding the imagination.

You also make sculpture. Is there a different approach that you take with the three-dimensional? 

I have less experience in sculpture than in painting, but like my painting, I don't make a plan for what it will be in the beginning. It´s like the shape is gradually decided while I enjoy the feeling of the material, such as wool, cray etc, and searching for a wired but cute, and interesting shape.

What do you think is the most understood thing about Japanese artists from an international perspective? 

I’m not sure. A tendency to cherish subtle emotions, atmosphere, and transitions?

Has the pandemic changed the way you make art or think about art?

It hasn’t changed, but re-recognized, it is important for me that people can see and feel the art works directly. 

As a young, creative person—with all the political and climate uncertainty in the world—does the anxiety of the zeitgeist creep into your work at all? 

I don’t use specific political or climate issues directly as my concept, but I believe in any age, childlike pureness or the kinds of questions we have as children, are necessary for keeping ourselves together psychologically. I hope my work serves as a reminder of that.

Your new series represented at Frieze, can you talk about them a little bit - is there a specific correlation or connection between them? 

I will show six paintings that are continuing to each other. There are girls, each are in the different layers — one is in the very front, or one is almost hiding behind clouds, or between. And also, each color is in different motifs in the other canvas, so object and abstract changes in different canvas. So, people may get a feeling of floating in the clouds in the layer outside of canvas.

What do contemporary Japanese artists think of Los Angeles? 

I like the city where I can easily go walking or take a bicycle around small streets, Los Angeles is so huge for me! But also it is nice to get inspired by its vastness of scale.

Temporal Vertigo: An Interview Of Nicolas G. Miller

 

Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000
photograph courtesy ofstudio photography

 

interview by Isabelle Albuquerque
photographs by ofstudio photography

If you look up close and if you have an exceptional memory for Old Hollywood character actors, you will clearly make out the distinctive face of Everett Sloane with his signature wide-set eyes and crooked nose. Known primarily for his roles in The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, and Citizen Kane, the actor, songwriter, and theatre director took his life by way of barbiturate overdose in 1965 at the age of 55. Here, he is immortalized and miniaturized by artist Nicolas G. Miller in the form of a bronze statuette. He appears to move with a brisk, yet cool stride walking down an imaginary runway wearing Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000. In the following interview, Isabelle Albuquerque sits down with Miller to discuss the temporality of fashion, the process of sculpting in bronze, and the act of breathing life into the deceased.

Isabelle Albuquerque: How did art first come into your life?

Nicolas G. Miller: My first memorable experiences with art were of the work of my maternal great-grandfather, Orville J. Hanchey. He was a painter, educator, and all-around bon vivant. When I was very young, I was lucky enough to visit Orville at his home. He was already quite old when I visited and had retired from his post as Professor of Art at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He lived in a small house that was stuffed with his paintings and all manner of marvelous objects. Orville's paintings are delicately rendered watercolors of flower arrangements. There were two that hung in my childhood home. I recall staring at them often and wondering how he was able to make the petals of lilies look so beautifully diaphanous. And, to be honest, I still don’t know how he did it!

ALBUQUERQUE: Oh how beautiful. Thinking of the petals of his lilies makes me think also of the draping of the Yohji pants in your sculpture Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000. I’m obsessed with how they fall. How the fuck did you do that?

MILLER: Thank you very much, Isabelle! The trickiest thing about sculpting my statuette was the clothing. The majority of examples I’ve seen of sculpted clothing are from classical art. In other words, it is all tunics. Not pants, lugged sandals, button-up shirts or high heels. I knew in this piece, since it was Yohji, the pants would be the main attraction. I aimed to keep the viewer entranced as their gaze glides along the surface of the sculpture. There is a technique developed in the 1990s by the automobile designer Chris Bangle when he worked for BMW called “flame surfacing”. The idea was to use compound curves to mimic the form of flames on the exterior of sports cars. The 2003 BMW Z4 stands as a good example. When a flame-surfaced automobile drives by at night, pools of light form along the compound curves creating a pleasing visual effect similar to watching a log burn in a fireplace. I was hoping to achieve this effect, but at the scale and speed of sculpture, particularly the Yohji pants.

ALBUQUERQUE: Of course, you flame-surfaced them. Ha! When did fashion first begin to emerge in your art?

MILLER: That is a very interesting question. I am a sculptor and sculpture is generally preoccupied with questions of space (scale, proportion, site, etc). Fashion, on the other hand, seems bound up with questions of time (seasonal releases, the cyclical recurrence of styles, etc). I have always been drawn to works of art that attempt to present contradictory terms. Fashion entered into my sculptural vocabulary as a way of asking questions about time and temporality within sculpture.

ALBUQUERQUE: Yes, exactly. And the way you connect to particular seasons and collections in fashion allows the work to both act as a time travel object and also have a discrete connection to a specific moment in time. Speaking of a specific moment in time—what are you wearing right now?

MILLER: I am at home and am wearing a black cotton sweatshirt. On the sweatshirt is a white screen print of an image of downtown Los Angeles. Two impossibly large palm trees are superimposed on top of the cityscape, and just above the palm trees are the words "Los Angeles, California." It is the sort of sweatshirt you buy as a souvenir on Hollywood Blvd., which is precisely where I bought it. Below that I am wearing black polyester athletic shorts manufactured by Kappa and designed for Napoli SSC, a professional soccer team based in Naples, Italy. It is the kind of outfit I put on without thinking too much.

ALBUQUERQUE: Ah! Yes! Superimposed palm trees forever.  I love Hollywood Blvd and visit its souvenir shops often. Jon and I used to make posters for our music shows on top of old signed glamour shots from unknown actors. There is so much longing and loss in those images. What made you decide to work with actors who are no longer living in clothes made decades after their deaths?

MILLER: This piece is one in a series of sculptures of old Hollywood actors dressed in new clothes. Each of the actors were well known in the first half of the twentieth century. In their sculpted form they will all be wearing runway looks from the year 2000. It is important to me that the clothes were designed after the actors had passed away. This structure has an internal logic that reminds me of the logic of fashion, wherein two disparate moments are brought in close proximity to one another. I hope the impossibility of these combinations gives the viewer a sense of temporal vertigo. Vertigo is frequently associated with a sensation of spatial imbalance. It is often described as "the world around you spinning." Recently, I have the sense that the world around me is spinning, but through time rather than space.

ALBUQUERQUE: Yes. I know exactly what you mean. How does bronze hold time for you? 

MILLER: As with so many materials the more I look into bronze the less clearly it signifies. On its surface bronze is meant to imply permanence. Yet the history of bronze sculpture in Europe is one of constant change and impermanence. Large, bronze public statues were erected to symbolize new world orders, but were often melted down to make weapons to fight wars. Despite the common sense that bronze implies permanence, it is far more plastic than one would first think. 

In the act of making this piece at a foundry I was struck by a sense of eternal return. In the lost-wax process of producing a bronze sculpture, first the sculptor makes a maquette. The maquette is then destroyed in the process of making a silicone mold. Then the silicone mold is used to produce a wax version of the maquette. This wax version is encased in an investment mold (a hard concrete-like substance). Then the wax is melted out and bronze is poured into the investment mold. Finally the investment mold is destroyed in order to reveal the bronze. At each step of the process, the objects created in the previous step are destroyed. This gives the final product the effect of permanence, which reminds me of the logic of seasons and the return of styles in fashion. 

I imagine the final resting place for my statuettes to be a domestic setting. Perhaps atop a mantel. Another common object that sits on a mantel is a clock. As time passes, the outfits sculpted into the bronze statuettes, and perhaps the actors too, will go in and out of fashion, not dissimilar to the way that the hands on a clock go round and round.

ALBUQUERQUE: Wow. Yes. I love thinking about the impermanence of bronze and the lost wax casting process. Even in the name of the process we have the word, lost. With the last few years in lockdown, I think we’ve all been thinking about lost time and life. The hands on the clock going round and round for real. How do you breathe time and life into people who are no longer with us? Since these actors were alive before scanning technology, do you work from photographs/film stills/collective memory?

MILLER: I sculpt in a 3D software called ZBrush. This software was developed to give the feeling of sculpting in digital clay. I learned a technique for sculpting portraits in ZBrush from a digital sculptor who worked at Industrial Light & Magic. When it came time to choose a subject, all of the other students in his course selected contemporary Hollywood actors. At first I thought this was simply in keeping with the general culture of "digital art," but there is a much more practical element to it. In order to sculpt a portrait properly in ZBrush, you need a great number of reference images. Preferably images taken from many angles.

At first, I thought I would sculpt one of the Fayum portraits from the 1st century AD. The Fayum Portraits were painted on wood and buried with upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. The depictions are truly haunting. Since the paintings were intended to be buried with their subjects, neither the painter nor the sitter imagined a future where the pictures would be seen by posterity. This idea of an image without a future feels so foreign to me. I quickly realized that sculpting from these images was too difficult and that the Fayum portraits are probably best left as paintings. 

I then began working with old Hollywood actors. I make large collections of promotional photographs and film stills of each actor before I begin sculpting. What I realized when I started to manipulate the digital clay is how very different a face can look when shot under different lighting and with an assortment of camera lenses. My statuettes end up as montages of the faces of bygone actors—many moments condensed into one.

 

Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000
photograph courtesy ofstudio photography

 

ALBUQUERQUE: Yes! You can really feel that in the work. Is there significance in the sculpture’s smaller-than-life scale?

MILLER: The scale is of utmost importance to me! In France, during the Art Deco period, there was a preponderance of small figurative sculptures—also known as statuettes. Many bronze foundries opened in order to keep up with the demand from the rising bourgeois class for bronze art. These statuettes were anywhere from sixteen to twenty-two inches and intended for domestic display. The economic structure of companies such as Susse Frères or LN Paris JL is very interesting to me. They both had foundries in the countryside and exhibition spaces in the city. Both foundries supported a large network of figurative sculptors by commissioning maquettes that they would sell in editions. 

This moment was also ripe with promises of grand technological advancement. There was growing optimism around electroplating, which claimed to provide a thin seamless layer of precious metal atop any sculpted form. The fantasy was that it would remove much of the need for human labor from the process of making a fine metal sculpture. When I came across this moment in the history of European sculpture I was deeply struck by the similarities to our time, in particular the promises of 3D technologies and their applications in sculpture.

Susse Frères would produce beautiful catalogs for customers filled with photographs of their statuettes. I am making advertisements for posters and magazines of my statuettes as a way of drawing out similarities between the moment of Art Deco statuettes and my own work. I also want to allude to the possibilities for sculpture in a model like Susse Frères.

ALBUQUERQUE: Very cool. Now that you have released the little man into the wild, what are you working on next?

MILLER: Lupe Vélez in Hussein Chalayan S/S 2000.

ALBUQUERQUE: AHHHHHHH Cannot wait for her.

Tomorrow's Anxieties: An Interview of Jillian Mayer

 
Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery photograph by Maximilian Lecki

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery
photograph by Maximilian Lecki

 


interview by Kelly Loudenberg


Jillian Mayer gets stuck in your head. I still find myself randomly humming the tune to her pop song, “Mega Mega Upload,” even though it’s been ten years since I first saw the video she made for it. Her short, catchy video “I am your Grandma” has a cult following on YouTube and TikTok and is so delightfully bizarre that it’s bound to be discovered by youngsters for decades to come. Her Slumpies, sculptural furniture designed to help people use their smartphones, are found in airports by travelers who don’t know her, only that her art helps them maintain comfort while staring into Instagram. 

Her latest show, TIMESHARE at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, likewise wedges its way into your psyche. It leaves me feeling unsettled, yet inspired. It feels urgent but timeless as it examines the impending collapse of society as climate change throws our functional-enough world into chaos and turmoil. Her in-progress mobile bunker recalls the highbrow living spaces of Buckminster Fuller and Andrea Zittell, but also elicits the vibe of the RVs and trailer parks—the most economical but low-brow living spaces of the American landscape.

Who’s to say if the world ends, that you can’t take a shower in a shiny resin tub, covered in shimmer and pastels, and thereby maintain a bit of the soul-affirming glamour of the pre-end-times era? Her floating sculptures—functional in a world where all the ice-caps have melted—could literally save lives. I’ve been to prepper school myself, but I prefer Jillian’s whimsical, yet functional lo-fi take on how to survive with artistic flair once the shit hits the fan.

KELLY LOUDENBERG: Can you tell us about the art you’re making now and what led up to the work in your traveling exhibition, TIMESHARE?

JILLIAN MAYER: I explore how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities by processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in various landscapes. My work used to focus more on digital and social media technologies, but I have expanded that to any technology that helps us adapt to our future selves. 

In the simplest terms, my artwork generally describes tomorrow's anxieties. I tend to look at contemporary issues, like internet existence for the past ten years and the looming ecological and infrastructural collapse of the last four years. I do offer solutions and environments, and often function as some type of a "host" in my work, trying to shed new ideas for adaptive living. I tend to make artwork that has a consistent thread, which models how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation, calling into focus ideas of value, dependency, adaptation, and communication. 

After years of making work, I’ve been thinking about the real future, not our current understanding of the future, but rather beyond that; beyond the sleek aluminum and titanium.  I am more drawn to the dystopias that have the grass that creeps over your broken solar-powered cars, the wild boars walking into your smart house with Siri telling them the hot weather, and rats festering in a pile of iphones on your self-disinfecting, hypoallergenic sofa.

I work in a lot of different mediums simultaneously. Videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, installations—they are all fair game. It’s whatever will convey the idea and the serotonin boost best. 

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery photograph by Cliff Dossel

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery
photograph by Cliff Dossel

LOUDENBERG: Your show TIMESHARE and the floating LAKE SCULPTURE comes from a long history of you exploring survival and prepper cultures. Where did this come from?

MAYER: I am from Miami and it’s one of the major cities that will be wiped out first by sea level rise. With our location and coastal nature, my life was defined by tropical storms and hurricanes. Floridians and many coastal residents are aware of the upcoming hurricane seasons as well as the predictions for our future based on weather patterns. We know the names of past hurricanes like former classmates we recall from school. We are familiar with cone-shaped predictions and color-coded emergency threats from nature. I grew up in South Florida with an immigrant father (by way of Cuba to Miami Beach) with most of his family already murdered in the Holocaust. So, there were always plenty of idioms available to me as a child about making plans and the weather or god laughing in your face. I think there is a relentless humor in much of my work and general point of view.

LOUDENBERG: When did you become so obsessed with weather? Was it through making art?

MAYER: In 2019, Hurricane Irma was predicted to crush South Florida and it became a Mandatory Evacuation Zone. As I was moving lawn furniture inside and strapping things down, I took a hard look at my body of Slumpie Sculptures.

My sculptures often live outdoors and are pretty large. So, I sort of just ride it out when it comes to natural disasters making landfall with the capacity of destroying my physical works. I can talk all day about hurricane feelings but I am trying to answer your question. Instead of relocating my sculptures, I just tied them to a tree. My landlord told me to write my name and phone number on them in case they fly away and land a few blocks down the road. I realized due to their foam core, they are more likely to float than sink.

I started thinking about all the people with money who were able to prepare for upcoming disasters, able to leave the state to another location.  Around that time, a study had been done that stated that 40% of Americans do not have an extra $400.00 to cope with an emergency expense. As many South Floridians loaded up their gas tanks, boarded their homes, and filled up their cars with items from the store, I thought about all the people that just had to sit around and hope the storm would spare them. 

I thought about all those who lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and sat on their roofs waiting for FEMA to rescue them. I thought about the six feet of mud and salt water that made my childhood home unable to be entered. The roof provided safety, whether it was connected to a one hundred thousand dollar house or a $4 million house. The value was in the chance for survival in desperate times.

It led me to considering how in times of emergency, something like a Louise Bourgeois “Spider”—a canonical history and worth around $35 million—may save your life the same way that a broken down pickup truck can when the storm waters come flooding in. Value is in opportunity and chance.

LOUDENBERG: Have you taken survivalist courses? If so, what are some things you learned? Can you start a fire without a match? 

MAYER: I went to Prepper Camp in Fall of 2020 in North Carolina. I was recording my talks with people while I asked them about the core essence of being prepared. Aside from practical survivalist info and homesteading rituals, I learned a lot about their community. The coordinators yelled at me to stop recording because they thought I was a dubious person but I kept trying to let them know I am an artist just doing research. They asked me “what kind of art?” and I said “mostly abstract sculpture.”  They didn’t mean to scare me, they are just protective over their community. The only iffy thing is it seemed to be a Trump-heavy crowd.

LOUDENBERG: Do you think the problem is now at a scale that it can't be addressed?

MAYER: Here is the part where I won't pretend to be an environmental scientist, because I am an artist. But I do boast being an optimist. No doubt, humans create massive problems everywhere we go (ex: space junk) but nature redesigns itself, mutates, and carries on for various organisms … as it is the nature of nature.

I do tend to occupy a fatalistic nihilism position in my views. I think humans are on Earth until we are not. That might be from pollution leading to increased carbon loads and temperature issues, or a comet just smashing us to star bits. 

Ultimately, humans are getting a chance at Earth. Earth will be around longer than humans. Earth will be fine and it's important not to get obsessed with an anthropocentric approach to existence. It is hard, and I get that, and I constantly have to check myself. But we are here, doing our silly human things, for a collection of decades, if we are lucky. Nonetheless, we are here for now and we, as the human race, try to figure out ways to survive. I am really happy I am alive and trying to make the most of it. Just wishing kindness and equality was in greater practice and I try to be a better human every day.

LOUDENBERG: Do you see humor and art as effective forms of change?

MAYER: Humor has always been an entry point for dialogue in my work and life. Hard and uncomfortable topics aren’t usually inviting, so if I can use a joke or any other device to wedge a beat and open up a conversation, I will. It's hard for us humans to face our mortality in a personal way. I do hope I die by way of mother Earth, rather than a car crash or something like that. I might be off topic.

LOUDENBERG: How and why do you choose your materials to construct your larger sculptures?

MAYER: I lean towards industrial materials that have associated functions. I describe my Slumpie sculptures as boats or surfboards in a material sense. Fiberglass, epoxy, foam. I get all of my foam donated and derail it from its single-use journey to the landfill. The foam I use was previously lining crates of boxes used for transporting art. I like that my artwork springs out of the circle of art detritus.

LOUDENBERG: What’s Next?

MAYER: Also informed by preparedness and survival is a Mobile Bunker Artist Residency I have been building with friends called “LOW RES.” Built from a converted twenty-foot trailer, the bunker is designed to be reliant on as few outside services as possible. It's a functional, off-grid, tiny home that feels like an art installation. Ideally, it is both a low-impact, off-grid artist residency and a mobile hub of anonymous, untraceable space for organizers and communities in need. The design of the structure draws inspiration from the tiny-house movement and survivalist bunkers. 

To learn more about Jillian Mayer, follow her on instagram @jillian_mayer_

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery photograph by Cliff Dossel

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery
photograph by Cliff Dossel

The Parapsychic Sculptor: An Interview Of Corin Johnson

 
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interview by Lara Monro
photographs by Mattea Perrotta

Artist Corin Johnson has spent over thirty years traversing the art world with his exceptional stonemasonry and wood carving craftsmanship. Corin has collaborated with some of the world's most renowned visual artists including Paul Noble, as well as focusing on his own practice (which includes drawing, modeling, and unique stone, marble, and wood carvings), the work is varied with a unique and colorful story behind each piece. Recently, he has found himself locked down in his studio with the musically-acclaimed Nick Cave. They met in the ‘90s when the musician reached out having seen a bust of himself created by Johnson; a commission by a Cave fanatic. During lockdown, the duo have formed a creative bond and partnership. 

Confident with his craft, there aren't many materials Johnson hasn't mastered; marble, resin, wood, and ceramics, to name a few. His creations range in both size and style as do his commissions: from large-scale marble portraits and restoration projects that include the Clarkson Memorial, a celebration of Thomas Clarkson, a central figure in the campaign against the slave trade in the British Empire, to salvaging intricate antique tiles. His own projects include kitsch porcelain bird sculptures and a wood carving of his beautifully large and shaggy sheepdog, Charlie. 

Growing up, Corin was introduced to the Spiritualist Church through his Grandmother. His interaction with mediums was informative as he recalls members of the congregation foreseeing his future working as a sculptor. While he no longer follows the Church, his fascination with Parapsychology has been hugely informative in both his personal and professional life. Regular Zoom meetings with mediums and guided meditations leave him with strong symbolic imagery, which help to harness his spiritual and creative growth. Johnson’s effortless eccentricity is encapsulated by all of his unique philosophies and ideologies, and perhaps exaggerated by his love for different stones and the varying qualities and powers they hold (he often finds different types in his jacket pockets).  

Situated in South London’s Camberwell, Corin’s home and studio, both within a 5 minute walk of one another, are evident displays of his personality. Inviting Autre to document both, we explored the art works sporadically placed in his pink entrance hallway, blue sitting room with solitary piano and kitchen, where opera music plays and tea mugs with cold coffee from yesterday are set amongst Mexican Masks he picked up on his travels in Oaxaca. Every now and then, faint sounds of the painter decorator upstairs are heard over the radio as Corin speaks about his relatively unknown practice and love for collaboration with others. To accompany the interview, Autre partnered with the American visual artist, Mattea Perrotta, who documented the interview with her film camera. 

LARA MONRO: Did you jump straight into sculpting and stone carving from school? 

CORIN JOHNSON: I left school and didn't want to do an arts foundation course. I wanted to learn the skills and not just the theory; to understand how to be a good draftsman and how to create sculpture. I actually went to a career centre and they said to me that someone had been looking for sculptor apprentices. They set up a meeting and I went to work for them. I still use them to source my materials today. It is here that I met Faith Tolkien, the granddaughter of J. R.R Tolkien. While I already had a bit of experience with stone carving, she taught me so much more. The sculptor, Michael Black introduced me to Faith. He also became a mentor of sorts when it came to my sculpting career. He created the big empress head sculptures around the Bodleian Library and worked with lots of weird and wonderful metals. One of my first sculpture jobs was working with a woman called Rachel Shorter. She had transitioned from a man to a woman. Before she went through the change, Rachel had been a stone carver. She had a huge amount of knowledge around the craft. It was hard back then to be taught the sculpture skills. She really showed me the ropes. She had a basement where she made dresses for dolls. It was a pretty niche and unique experience. She would occasionally lace my food with a bit of magic mushroom. 

MONRO: How long have you been in London?

JOHNSON: I've been here for a long time, about thirty years — mainly in the South. I used to be in Kennington. My first place was in Russell Square, a nice squat. It's all very posh now but it was more rough and ready then. Near Great Ormond Street. I went to art college in Kennington. 

MONRO: Who did you start out working with when you took on stone masonry and artist collaborations?

JOHNSON: I used to work with a guy called John Buckley who did these mad sharks coming out of roofs — he does mad pieces. Skellington lovers is one of his new ones: a smashed up old barn in the middle of the countryside. It is a cool thing to come across. 

MONRO: You seem to work with a number of varied materials. Which is the main one you find yourself regularly returning to?

JOHNSON: I always seem to return to stone. 

MONRO: You work with a lot of other artists. How do you separate your practice with the collaborations? 

JOHNSON: I find it organic. I love working with different people and ideas. I find it a bit boring having one idea. I like the collaboration and how it provokes and develops ideas and visions. Each project is my project too — I always put my heart and soul into it. I’ve worked with Paul Noble on a number of series. His turds, for example, were for the Turner Prize. He came to me with the idea and had made some maquettes that we changed and developed a little bit. I work with clay, wood, resin, anything really — a bit of bronze here and there. I see it as a form, rather than the material. I do love stone and marble. I enjoy natural materials and wax. I do quite a lot of mold making as well. 

MONRO: Do you find it difficult going between mediums say stone and marble and then wax or wood? Do you have to switch your brain to different modes for the varied materials you work with?

JOHNSON: A little bit. It takes a while to get into the flow of working with a certain medium, I guess. To get good at it, it takes a day or two sometimes to get back into the flow. I find that with stone — you work away at it and suddenly the flow is there. It just clicks and almost feels like it does the work itself. 

MONRO: Do you find it a cathartic process?

JOHNSON: Yes, but like anything, it has its highs and lows. 

MONRO: Over the years you have worked on an abundance of projects and collaborated with a number of artists and institutions. Can you tell me a bit about where your work has taken you and who you have worked with? 

JOHNSON: I spent time on Indian reservations, worked and lived with sculptors in Africa, California, taught at a sculpture school in China and London, and worked amongst some of the best Italian marble sculptors in Italy (Pietra Santa) to produce sculptures with Paul Noble. The project with Paul was for Gagosian Gallery and nominated for the Turner prize. I also worked to make a huge limewood meditation tree for Ibrahim El-Salahi for Somerset House a couple of years back. I also used to work with the top letter carver / calligrapher called Richard Kindersley. What I learnt with him stuck and I ended up doing the memorial for the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, for Westminster Abbey and worked as part of a team of three on Lady Diana’s memorials at Althorp. I have worked very successfully with the Architect Peter Inskip on very classical projects for many wonderful grand houses. I have done quite a few animal projects, a huge, red stone fox outside a museum near Lewis, a pair of Ounces in Country Derry and a pair of Yale’s for St John’s College Cambridge (I also did a series of about 8 gargoyles for them).

I have also worked with Nick Cave. I designed and sculpted the infamous Nick Cave Warracknabeal Equestrian Monument Marquette. This was meant to be placed in his hometown. It was shown in a few exhibitions. 

MONRO: How do the collaborations come about? They seem very organic.

JOHNSON: With Ibrahim El-Salahi, I was showing with Vigo Gallery, doing a series of kitsch granny statues of birds in block marble. They knew I was in an exhibition with Marcus Harvey — he was curating a show and asked me to do a piece, at Kings Place, so I did a massive wood carving for that and they saw the work and asked if I’d work with Ibrahim. With Paul Noble, he put the word around for marble sculptures and came to my studio. Then Nick came about because a guy I was living with asked me to do a wooden head of Nick. He was growing weed and his best mate was a huge Cave fan. He commissioned me to do this head and somehow Nick saw it. He found my dad's number, called him, put me in touch, and we met. 

MONRO: I read that you and Nick met in a club?

JOHNSON: I met him one night in a club. I was with a girlfriend and we had had a bit of a tiff. This guy came up behind me and said, “Corin, do you want a drink?” He invited us to his table and that’s when he first talked about doing the horse sculpture. 

MONRO: You have been working with Nick at your studio over lockdown?

JOHNSON: Yes, on a ceramics project! He first came to the studio to make work for his online store, Cave Things, then we started experimenting, and our creative collaboration began to grow organically. 

MONRO: Where do you get your material from?

JOHNSON: From all over! Sometimes I buy the wood green or at timbre yards, or other sculptors will give me material. The one with the couple was given to me. The marble I use is from Italy, usually. The ones I did with Paul were from there — we travelled together to Italy and chose the pink stone. I’m doing another big pink marble piece at the moment actually. Made a cat for Susie Cave recently for her fashion label. 

MONRO: Your house is filled with beautiful art and trinkets. Can you tell me a bit about where they have come from? 

JOHNSON: I was lucky enough to meet an artist called Peter Snow when I moved to London. He was a painter, professor of art at the Slade, and a set designer for theatre: he did the first Waiting for Godot with Beckett and he introduced me to lots of wonderful artists including Craigie Aitchison, who I collaborated with. I have drawings by Euan Uglow, Georgina Starr, Paul Noble, paintings by James Johnston (ex bad seeds musician), Harry Pye, Rudolph Valentino, and John Buckley. 

 
 

MONRO: What do you think of the art world? 

JOHNSON: Generally, I don't find it that easy to be a part of. There seems to be a lot of politics, but I can't complain too much. I have worked with some of the biggest blue chip Galleries and it has always been enjoyable. The collaborations have been good, but your talent isn't necessarily nurtured unless you are selling. The money-driven, commercial side is quite tough. I would be keen to work within the arts more, if I can, as my own entity! It would be nice to dip my toe in!

MONRO: You were introduced to the Spiritualist Church by your Grandmother. Would you say that your interaction with this alternative faith has influenced your work? 

JOHNSON: Yes, I definitely think I have taken much from Spiritualism and that it has influenced my work, kind of like the healer sculpture. However, I wouldn’t call myself a Spiritualist. More accurately I would say I have always been interested in Parapsychology; always looking into different faiths such as Buddhism, Sufism and reading about different esoteric teachers like Gurdjieff, Paramahansa Yogananda, Paul Brunton, as well as reading about things like cases of people remembering a previous incarnation or learning about tribal beliefs about things like ‘Dreamtime’ exploring and ancestor spirits, such as American-Indian beliefs. 

I think the more moral (following the teachings of Jesus) side of being brought up with Spiritualism might have encouraged me and fed into some of my public work, like the statue of St. Andrew for Exeter College Oxford, the two statues of Christian martyrs on the front of Westminster Abbey, and the panel for Wisbech of Thomas Clarkson. 

MONRO: What are you working on at the moment? 

JOHNSON: I am currently working on several projects, including another collaboration with Edmund de Waal and am assisting Nick on the ceramic sculpture project I mentioned before. I have also done six studies of Grace Jones that are in her private collection. I am a judge for QEST that is the Queen’s charity for supporting artists, makers and people who want support starting up with interesting careers. I recently produced a series of multi-colored marble birds (including a pair of budgies, a goldfinch and a magpie with an egg) that were inspired by old-fashioned granny ceramics (Beswick birds). These were mainly shown with Vigo Gallery. I also recently created a limestone hare, which is currently with Messums Gallery.

 
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Existential Time: An Interview Of Gisela Colón

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interview by Summer Bowie

I conducted this interview with Gisela Colón on November 19, 2020, just after a mysterious obelisk-like structure was discovered in Utah’s Red Rock Country, and just days before the discovery was announced. Exactly when this crudely bolted, John McCracken-like monolith was initially installed is a mystery. That it was found by state employees counting sheep has been described as the most 2020 thing of 2020. Since then, multiple monoliths of varied fashion have been appearing and disappearing around the world, leading to a magnifying force of everything from commercial opportunists, to alien conspiracy theorists, to a Christian military LARPing crusade. Meanwhile, Gisela has been installing her solo exhibition, EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future, of monolith and rectanguloid sculptures created in quarantine from optical acrylics and aerospace carbon fiber. Her unique sculptural language embodies the way that time expands, retracts and collapses. Her two short films express the anxieties that result from isolation and inertness. Her inquiries into the laws of physics address non-linear time flows and they provide the viewer with a sensory and intellectual experience in the grand cosmic sense of time and space. In essence, these “organic minimal” forms inherently attract a diversified coterie of forces that might point toward all the reasons we could be feeling our fragmented world suddenly culled together by a mysterious ping.

SUMMER BOWIE: You studied economics in Puerto Rico, and then you came to Los Angeles to study law, but how exactly did you realize that your career would be at the intersection of art and aerospace technology?

GISELA COLÓN: I grew up in Puerto Rico and I went to University of Puerto Rico, studying economics with a minor in political science, but I was a painter very early on with my mother. We painted for years together, since I was four or five years old. I made paintings of everything around me in Puerto Rico, which is a particularly diverse biological region. So I painted still lifes and landscapes, spent a lot of time hiking in the rainforest, on the beach–I was exposed through my Puerto Rican upbringing to a really vibrant, alive biological world that’s at the root of all of my work. That’s my primal source where I go back to everything. When I graduated from university, I came to Los Angeles to study law, not because I was fascinated by law at all, but because I grew up fairly poor. It was survival mode: if I study law, I will be able to understand society and how society functions, especially as a woman growing up in Puerto Rico. It wasn’t easy, I lost my mother at twelve after she went through a terrible divorce with my father. There was a lot of violence in the men around me, everybody carried guns. So for pragmatic and practical reasons, I studied law in my twenties, but I kept on going back to the painting, and the art, and thinking, this is what I love doing. I created so much art in my youth and I want to continue to do it, and it worked its way into the right time.

BOWIE: Your work draws this very seamless connection between science and art. It seems like you’re constantly fusing the artistic sensibilities of your mother with the scientific ambitions of your father.

COLÓN: You just hit the nail on the head. I was brought up with both science and art very actively because my dad—being a PhD in chemistry—he always had all of these chemistry sets around, and we experimented with crazy things. My Puerto Rican grandmother was a pharmacist, so in her closet she had all of these medicine bottles and syringes lying around. I would grab them and start taking stuff out with the syringes as a kid and go inject the banana leaves, and then take the banana leaves and cook them in a pot. We were always making concoctions and chemistry things, and so it was really a duality of this art and science as a child that now I combine again. 

In fourth grade, I wanted to be a paleontologist and dig up dinosaur bones because it was so fascinating, looking at the rocks and the minerals. I went through that on my own, loving the earth and loving the kind of archaeological vestiges, or past history of our existence on Earth. 

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

By fifth grade, I started really studying outer space and science, and I was just fascinated by the moon. I’d spend hours looking up at the moon and the sun and trying to identify the planets at night in the sky, and I said I want to be an astronaut. I remember my mother saying, “You can be whatever you want to be, but if you’re an astronaut, you’re never going to be able to get married and have kids.” It was the traditional woman’s view of the world. That wouldn’t have deterred me per se, but it made me think twice–do I really want to go and do this? Then by sixth grade, I was back onto loving the art. It was just as a child, going through all the different progressions and iterations of your thoughts and your environment. Put it all in a soup pot, and then years later it comes out.

BOWIE: It seems a great many layers of your identity were established at a very early age. A lot of artists emulate other artists early on in their practice, and your earliest works were often compared to many Light and Space artists like Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin, but was there a defining moment when it felt like your works were really your own?

COLÓN: Oh yeah, absolutely. When I first started painting, my earlier influences were more like the Latin American Op Artists that I had studied in books because I’m self-taught, so I would read about Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Soto, and all the traditional Latin painters, and then I became friends with a lot of the Light and Space contingency of older generation artists. I read all of Robert Irwin’s manifestos on perceptualism, and then I really got into minimalism and started spending a lot of time in Marfa studying Judd and Flavin and Doug Wheeler, John McCracken, and on and on. There was a phase there in the middle, what I call my transitional phase. When I first started working with plastic, I started painting the plastic similar to Kauffman, that was my springboard. Then, within a very few short months, I said, “this is not my thing because I have to pursue something different that has not been done before.” 

That’s when I started experimenting with these new optical materials. There’s no paint involved, and it was like I had this eureka moment where I would form a piece, and then I’d put it on the floor, and I’d put something underneath it, and then I’d form another layer until I struck upon this whole layering of materials, which created a prism. It’s the point of view of a woman and of a Latinx artist, because that’s the other dimensionality. It really pisses me off when people say, “Oh, you’re a second generation space artist.” No, I’m not! Not even fifth generation, for god’s sake. It’s been sixty years. I am a Latin woman in the 21st century using modern materials that had never been used before and creating my own language, my own vocabulary, which I’ve titled organic minimalism. It’s a new and different interpretation from the point of view of somebody who puts life and this whole Latin point of view in their objects.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

BOWIE: Another thing I think that struck me is the way that your works are often considered a feminist take on Finish Fetish, and yet I’d say there’s a rather loud expression of femininity that has gone almost unrecognized in the works of say, Billy Al Bengston or Peter Alexander, et al.

COLÓN: Don’t even get me started on that topic because I’ve written a whole essay on this—not published yet—but have you studied Craig Kauffman’s work? Pink bubbles...think about this, the titles. Bubbles. He made dishes, he made donuts. There were all these things that belong in the kitchen. It was the purview in that era of women, and most of his colors and his glitter—oh, his flowers contain glitter—so if you look at all the titles, flowers, dishes, donuts, loops—you know loops that look like a piece of clothing hanging on the loop? Like on a clothesline? To me, his entire oeuvre, when I look at it, is made by a woman, except that he was a man. 

I’m taking the masculine, like these monoliths, which have destructive references to projectiles, bullets, rockets and missiles, and feminizing it; softening it to the world. I reference Judy Chicago a lot in this process because her atmospheres from the 1970s are precedent. Basically, what she did is she put these colors out into the world that were the feminine impulse and softened things. I’m putting these impulses of women, and you could say femininity, but it’s really more feminist. It’s saying, “I can tackle the purview of men. I can tackle these forms and, as a woman, be fluid in the gender approach to my work. I can do all this and still be strong and create meaningful work.” It’s this fluid gender spectrum that’s embedded in the work, because when you look at some of my more organic forms, they’re vessels for life, like cells or things that generate life.

BOWIE: It’s really interesting because they have a very phallic shape, and yet at the same time, those nuclei are almost like the yolks of an egg.

COLÓN: Well also it could be phallic penetration, or reproduction—some people say they see a womb and the seed of a baby, or life inside. It really fluctuates fluidly between genders. It’s really oscillating between masculine and feminine. I can take anything; I can go from masculine to feminine and back. 

BOWIE: There’s something to be said about the subtlety of such a subversion. At first glance, the works feel anything but political. You’re experiencing them on such a sensational level, moving around them, watching them change, and it takes a while for all of the implications to set in, which is really nice. You have to sit with it for a moment while it all sinks in.

 
Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Rubidium Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Rubidium Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

 

COLÓN: What you’re getting at is the whole topic of beauty as a concept in art, and beauty is a bad word. You’re not supposed to make beautiful art, or you’re not supposed to make art that is attractive to the eye, but there’s a wide range of artists that are abstractionists that have made beautiful work, like Sam Gilliam. They’re finally getting recognized as people realize it’s okay to make beautiful work with an undertone of political statement that’s not always specifically identified, but it’s there by virtue of its existence. It’s there by virtue of the fact that the artist that is making it is making this kind of work. That’s the political statement.

BOWIE: You make works that change color and form as the viewer moves, and these qualities are highly sensitive to the environment that surrounds them. Are the environmental conditions of the exhibition space something that you consider before or after making the work?

COLÓN: I never considered it before because I make the work knowing that it is a variable and mutable object and that it will alter depending on where you place it and who’s looking at it. Now, I do like presenting it in the proper lighting. Obviously once it gets into the commercial gallery setting or the museum setting, I want to make sure that everything is lit properly so that the viewers can really experience the full spectrum, but the works are alive. It’s kind of like they’re alive and they do things sometimes that you’re not expecting, so they have a life of their own. 

BOWIE: And when people collect the works, do you prescribe the conditions of the environment they’re displayed in at all?

COLÓN: I would prescribe a proper lighting, but it’s really up to them. It’s their work. If they want to experience something a little differently, that’s them. I’ve had collectors who have said to me, “Oh my god, during the day it looks one way, and in the middle of the night, I walked around the living room, everything was turned off, and all of a sudden the thing was glowing at me.” It’s really up to the collector to enjoy it, and that’s part of the perceptual experience that it really is in the eye of the beholder, it’s participatory. The ultimate enjoyer of the work completes the experience.

 
Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Gamma Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Gamma Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

 

BOWIE: I don’t think your work is ever acknowledged as performance, but there’s a performative aspect to it because the object is always performing in relationship to the viewer and the environment.

COLÓN: It is, but what I think you’re hitting on is the element of time. Performance is time, but in this case what you encounter is a real sense of memory. You can have a memory of an object, and have that picture in your head, and then encounter it at a later time and it changed completely. So, the performative aspect even goes beyond just the moment, but it involves memories and the capturing of ideas that will resurface later on. This whole concept of collapsing time, existential time, is woven into that participatory aspect that you’re talking about.

BOWIE: How has the use of a time-based medium such as film made it easier or more challenging to address the non-linearity of time?

COLÓN: Well in fact, that was the greatest kind of paradox. Here I was talking about this stasis and paralysis and inertia, yet the only way of communicating it effectively was through this time-based medium, which takes you through the feeling quickly. So it was a paradoxical thing, but I enjoyed doing it. I think it’ll be effective.

BOWIE: When you’re making a work that changes with your every movement and that changes with the environment, how do you know that it’s done?

COLÓN: It’s a real visceral feeling. You know how, at some point when life started in the little cesspool of hot water, and there was that initial ray of light that came through the pond, and somehow that first cell started—that primeval, primordial spark of energy? I can feel it because that’s what I look for. That’s what I tap into when I’m making these pieces. When it’s completed is when I finally look down at it and it glows back at me like it’s alive. Then, I have that recognition that we have in ourselves. I say we’re all composed of stardust. We go back eons and eons into the universe, before time, so we have that instinctual knowledge, and a lot people don’t access it, or they don’t tap into it, but I always talk about how you can feel that if you just quiet the noise around you, get off of Instagram, and just really focus for a minute. You’ll feel what it is to be alive because it’s in your cells. I use the elliptical form a lot and that curvature which is present in our cells. Even our DNA strands involve movement, so this whole concept of movement in art is present inside us. We never stop moving; our cells never stop multiplying. I know when a piece is ready because I can feel it in my cells.

BOWIE: We are so used to experiencing time in this way where we take little snapshots of things, and we think of life happening in these blocks, when actually it is this amorphous, constantly moving thing. Looking at it like still images helps us to understand the world around us, but when we can’t give into that deep time, to that cosmic time, we lose our ability to instinctively feel when things are arriving or going.

COLÓN: Absolutely, because you don’t experience the passage of time absent change around you, which is why the quarantine was so nerve-wracking. There wasn’t much moving or changing, yet time was passing, and so yes, it’s that whole tapping into the cosmological realm that I think we really need in this day and age, just to check ourselves. I think a lot of my work, at the core, tries to address that; to bring certain feelings about in the people who view it, to go to that primeval source of life. The cosmological realm just fascinates me. There’s so much out there, the unknown, and I feel like we’re all searching for something, and nobody really talks about it, but it’s right there. All you gotta do is go out at night and look up in the sky, and when you really look at the stars and the moon–I know it sounds kind of superficial, but it’s not. When you really take it all in, it’s magnificent, what’s out there for us to access that we just don’t see every day.

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EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future is on view through January 3 @ GAVLAK Palm Beach 340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334

Romancing A Wound: An Interview of Estefania Puerta 

portrait and interview by Abbey Meaker


Estefania Puerta is a Colombian immigrant womxn whose interdisciplinary art practice transcends genre. Experiential installations featuring sculpture, video, scent, writing, and performance are steeped in layers of psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and profound insights into language, memory, ritual, and time. 

In early fall, after months of trying to connect, Estefania and I caught up on my back porch, listening to the trees, watching the light change. The pandemic made it challenging to get together, but she was also busy in her studio preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition Womb Wound, opening this Sunday, October 11th at Situations in New York. 

Hearing her describe this new body of work and the ideas investigated within it, I knew we had to sit down more formally—a perfect reason to delve more deeply into its transporting complexity. Her work evokes one’s own process of recollection which condenses, displaces, and plummets us abruptly into the forgotten (or misplaced) recesses of our past. 

ABBEY MEAKER: You’ve titled this body of work and your upcoming exhibition Womb Wound. You explained in a recent interview with Rachel Jones that this title represents an extended investigation of healing, of birthing something, being the holder and nurturer that then becomes wounded. This is definitely a universal paradigm: what does it mean to be rejected by a society that relies on those who have been cast out to sustain itself? And what happens when the rejected refuse the parasite?  

ESTEFANIA PUERTA: I’m glad you brought up the extended metaphors of wombs and birth. I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it. 

 
“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: Healing is an ongoing and sometimes unpredictable process, but ‘being healed’ of something implies a fixed state, yet all life forms are in a constant state of becoming. What value do you see in the act of nursing a wound, or ‘romancing a wound’ as you poetically put it, if it can never fully recover but instead continually evolves? 

PUERTA: Many of the ways in which I describe what I’m thinking about in the work just ends up feeling web-like instead of linear. Even thinking about the idea of romancing the wound—what does it mean to ease pain in a way that’s not healing it but enticing it into submission. I think healing is a constant state of becoming empowered in all the complexities that a wound offers, whether it be rage, sadness, pain, forgiveness, empathy, resentment, trauma, acceptance, etc. If healing is a portal into these complicated states then the wound is this fountain, a source, an opening and a flowing sting that keeps us in the simultaneity of being  animals and highly conscientious beings. I find that the wounds that I carry have also become what nurses me; they offer me a space to be truthful in the complexity of my experience being alive. The value I see in romancing a wound is thinking of it as taming a wild beast and knowing how to slow dance with it instead of trying to fight it away. 

MEAKER: You have said that this work is very personal, especially with regard to the family history and mythologies you’re mining. Even within this personal thread, the feeling of disconnect from family and the attempt to piece together fragments of an unknowable history is something I deeply connect with, albeit for very different reasons. 

PUERTA: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I feel like it's something that many of us, if not all of us, can relate to: the erasure of our own history and these glimpses we may have: moments of vulnerable truth that are obscured by a murky mystery. In my family there are moments of clarity that I have about the ways in which we exist—the characters in my family and the mystery about who they are, who they were. These histories get erased but manifest in other ways. I romance around these murky mysteries and create different signifiers to dwell with a bit. 

MEAKER: It’s interesting, the function of remembering. Memory has so much to do with one’s sense of self and the forging of their history. If we can’t remember, we create stories, stand-ins. 

PUERTA: Yes, for sure. But I think that’s the thing about the self referential vs the identity politics around it all. That is definitely a part of it and inevitable because we are all political bodies in this society. But I realized a lot of what I was dealing with was a personal, familial connection and the way that has been impacted by politics, but getting more into the heaviness around it. In some ways I feel like dealing with the political was my way of avoiding the familial and realizing that it’s something I actually want to deeply understand. I wanted to find a soothing place within that unknown. I’m always thinking about a family member and each of the pieces I make become homages to them and reflections in this really subtle way. There is a correspondence that I feel like I have with my family. In that they do become these mythological creatures to me that hold powers and different codes to a family history that then becomes a world.

MEAKER: Kind of a way to commune with ancestors.

PUERTA: Yes, but they are usually people that I have known or know. But they do still feel like ancestors to me because of that moment of unknowing them. There’s something about, especially older family members, that feel like they are both here and in some deep past that I don’t have access to. 

 
Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: This familiar/unfamiliar quality imbues your work with a sense of the uncanny. The sculpture titled Mija is particularly reminiscent of a body. It has an interior architecture, a bone structure. It has the qualities of an organism in that it’s alive and dying. It has a vibrancy and vitality but also shows signs of decline: dying plants against glowing water, soft and fleshy material edged by muddy mop-heads. Can you talk about these provocative, paradoxical qualities? 

PUERTA: Thinking of the too-muchness of all these materials, the excess in both ways of fleshy softness and the raggedy edges. I think of the mop heads as a filter, both in their material, cultured significance and also as a proposal and simulacra of cilia and other filters that exist in nature. My dad was a janitor for the majority of my life and I have a lot of love and fond connections to this material; riding on the floor buffing machine that felt like a giant, gentle beast as my dad was its tamer, guiding it across the floor. At the same time, I feel that sharpness in how immigrant labor can be almost fetishized in the U.S, how immigrants are seen as the filters, the holders, the purifiers of what others do not want to deal with. How these mops literally hold the muck and grime and how I think of them as tendrils protecting the soft interior of this sculpture. The guiding term I was thinking about for this piece was “creature comfort” and thinking of bodies that need regeneration, that are not just beat down and exhausted but are actually resting, re-generating, feeding themselves, finding comfort. Some referential inspirations are the feminine grotesque and the goddess of fertility, Artemis. 

 
“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: I’m thinking about flowers: they are prized for their external beauty and arousing scent (how they satisfy us); yet once picked, the flower wilts, browns, drops its pedals, leaving only a rotting, stinking tuft that is hastily discarded by its once devoted admirer. 

PUERTA: We remember a beautiful flower but not the decaying flower. I’ve been thinking about the idea of a fruiting body. Fungus as a fruiting body, flowers as a fruiting body, the body having its own potential to fruit in these dark places. The operation of nature within all of that. Not just the appearance of it but what does it actually do and mean and how do we identify with these processes.

MEAKER: Your sculpture Enrejada is similarly dichotomous. Spilling out of a grid-like structure lined with ears made of wax, are tendrils of pink fabric, hair, and a coiled umbilical cord. This feels like a raw, traumatic memory. Bits and pieces disconnected and out of place, trying to find each other. The burden of remembering and forgetting. 

 
Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

PUERTA: Hmm interesting, yeah, as you know, I am really interested in psychoanalysis and its poetic and very real history as it relates to hysteria and women’s experiences. Trauma is described as this type of repetition, a loop that you play over and over again but can never find the ending to it.  I do think this piece plays with that notion of repetition, the over emphasis of something that cannot be forgotten. But perhaps for me, the pain attached to trauma isn’t as present for me, I was thinking more of familial lineages (there is a spice blend in the sacks that my mother uses) and also what it means to be a sentient being. I made the ears during a time when I was in deep turmoil and a creative block. A friend read my tarot and saw an image of a tongue licking flowers and instructed me to get out of my head. I was talking myself in loops and what I needed to do was be present, to listen to the earth around me in a much more embodied way. As she read my tarot, I had this material in my hand with no purpose and instinctively started making ears, they felt beautiful and cathartic in my hands, they felt right and that just led me to other ideas of these pieces typically being seen as their primary sense of existence. We talk a lot about the gaze in a visual way, but what if a sculpture can hear you? What does it mean to have empowerment through another sense? To have auditory sentience and being-ness in the room and offer the act of listening to the “talker,” instead of the “viewer.” In that way, this piece actually feels really therapeutic or healing to me.

MEAKER: What has it been like making this work during a time of incredible tumult, fear, sickness, unknown, radical uprising? So much of what has been hidden has now come to light. 

PUERTA: It has been both my refuge and sanctuary, as well as the sharpest mirror reflecting the darkest parts of my soul. The part I may not have been ready to deal with. Making art always feels like you’re putting your hands into a void and hoping that whatever you’re holding onto or making gives something back to you that is nurturing. It was a hard, weird time to try to define what would be nurturing and whether it was even something worthwhile to define in this moment. And then coming back to the romantic and true feeling around art being its own space that, for better or worse, can keep us grounded in a different reality that isn’t always a hyper-politicized and materially cruel place. I realized that I am a valid person and that I am worthy of existence and expressing my existence. In that aspect, I feel so grateful I had this show to work towards; to have a mirror I had to constantly face, to ask the hard questions and get to the other side of it, where I feel more empowered than before. 

Womb Wound is on view from October 11 - November 15 with a reception on Sunday, October 11, 12-7 PM @ Situations in New York

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Hybrid Forms: An Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

interview by Summer Bowie

How does a country like Vietnam, absent of a black community, develop a rich brass band tradition with roots in the American South? How did the British flag inspire a Ghanaian tradition in textiles that is steeped in magical superstition? What do Aimé Césaire, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Emma Goldman all have in common? To find the answers to any of these questions you’d have to ask none other than the multi-disciplinary, head honcho of hybridity, artist Christopher Myers. His practice is as much about connecting the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Greece with those of Judeo-Christian scripture, as it is about connecting the migrations of syncratic practices across the globe and throughout history. His most recent solo exhibition, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort in Los Angeles primarily features hand-sewn flags depicting a wide array of syncratic allegories that in many ways define the globalized, contemporary psyche. These are the mythologies that form the foundation of our collective truth (though we know them to be fiction), and the forgotten legacies that have silently burrowed themselves deep into our cultural fabric. These narratives that inform us and define us find their way to us via oral traditions, dramatic performance, visual art and the printed page, and within all of these disciplines you will find Christopher Myers, obsessively studying the origins of every fiber, the intricacies of every pattern, and the channels of commerce that facilitate it all.

SUMMER BOWIE: Your new show, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort LA features primarily quilted tapestries fabricated in Luxor, Egypt. How did you find these artisans, and why textiles?

CHRISTOPHER MYERS: I was doing research for theater design. I worked with a collaborator, Kaneza Schaal, on a piece about the Egyptian Book of the Dead in 2014. And as part of the research for that book, I went to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. That trip was a gift of a trip. Luxor is a place that has been alive for generations and generations with culture, with religion, with spirituality, with all of the things that we all care about and love. And, while I was there, I ran into these fabric workers who work in the tourist trade. Because, the language that I speak most fluently is the language of speaking to other artists about making things, we quickly got into those conversations: what is the work you’re making, the years of training that go into hands that can sew so deftly, and the ways in which the tourist works aren’t really satisfying to them. So, we started to work together on work that is basic craft, but can speak to not only the traditions that I come from—traditions that are often relegated to poor people, or to women, or to people of color—but also to the other history that I’ve now encountered: from contemporary thinking and performance art, to work in other countries that I think this work is in dialogue with. 

I’m thinking especially of Asafo flags, which are a hybrid form in Ghana. The Ghanaian people, when they were colonized by the British, they saw the British parading with their flags and they saw these flags as a kind of magic that was used to exert power over them, and they thought, “we know how to make this magic. We can sew our own.” So, they made flags for parading, for teaching about their own specific identities. And, I love all of that work. Work that takes what the West has given us and then transforms it into art that speaks to the entire world.

BOWIE: In regard to those identities, it seems like you explore a lot of narratives and mythologies that are shared between several different cultures. So, a lot of the stories you are telling with these flags are stories that your fabricators are already familiar with as well. This is such a shared language.

MYERS: Absolutely. If you travel to places in which the pathways of tourism are less trod, you’ll find that the things that overlap in the venn diagrams of our identities end up being these larger myths, these bigger stories about what it means to be human, about ways of talking, about our relationship with the Divine, or our relationship with nature, or our relationship with the mass of humanity, and I think those are the overlaps that I’m particularly interested in. If you grow up like me: Catholic, but super involved in some super syncratic practices, you realize there’s a relationship between a god like Horus in ancient Egypt and the baby Jesus. I’m interested in the syncratic impulse and the mixing of mythologies.

BOWIE: Your sculptures explore the roles that men of African origins have played at various points in history. Can you talk a bit about the generational lineage and its relationship to labor and bondage that you’re referencing in these pieces?

MYERS: One of the things is that there are obviously syncratic impulses that people understand. You see images of God across cultures. But then, there are ways in which our cultural migration, our cultural instinct shows itself. So much of the iron work of the Old South was derivative of the West African iron workers who were forced to migrate here and were enslaved as highly skilled labor in the States. So, the techniques of iron work—the patterning of the wrought iron rails of New Orleans that we associate with upper class housing—are actually patterns that are borrowed from West Africa. I’m interested in those cultural mixings. For example, a collar that is filled with candles; I think a lot about the idea that so many of the people who were actually making shackles during the slavery period in the United States were West African imports. Black people who did the labor of building shackles—we were forced to build shackles for our brothers and sisters. I’m also fascinated by the idea that we did that, but there had to be moments of resistance, even if they were just symbolic. Moments of telling another story, and that is what’s most exciting. Similarly, I’m always interested in the way that no change is ever simple. No bondage is ever without complication.  

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

BOWIE: The rat cage mask—with its reference to vaudevillian sideshows, the bondage of both the human and animal performers involved—it feels like it really calls into question the opportunity for resistance. 

MYERS: And what’s interesting to me is that those stories are complicated, always. The 1980s were some of the last vestiges of that kind of performance. There was a guy who had some kind of bone deficiency in which his limbs were severely compromised, and he displayed himself as The Frog Man throughout Texas, and at some point a human rights group got wind of this and sponsored a very strident protest to this practice—without ever having consulted the guy. And the guy said, “If it hadn’t been for my life as a performer, I would still be selling pencils from a moving cart in Texas, but instead I’ve seen the world.” And, I think that we have to look at all of these stories and complicate them. To understand that nobody is that perfect victim that we want them to be. 

BOWIE: You started illustrating your father’s children’s books in the ‘90s. Did you initially learn the art of storytelling through him?

MYERS: My first storytelling coach would’ve been my grandfather, who didn’t read a word of English, but was the best storyteller that I’ve ever known. He didn’t read at all, he didn’t read a word of English, he didn’t read anything but he was a great storyteller. That is part of what I mean by coming from a tradition of artists, makers, and creators who may not be recognized by any kind of mainstream world. Of course, my father was a writer. Him being a writer, he was taking some of those things he learned from his father and translating them into a form that could be read, that was legible to others as an art form. But make no mistake, we were all very clear that the chief storyteller in my family was my grandfather, and that we’ve all just been trickling down from his talents.

BOWIE: You pull references from all over the world and across time. Your wide array of disciplines is just as disparate. Is there a common thread at all?

MYERS: I love making things. I have a slight addiction, maybe it’s a problem, I’m sure it would be diagnosable if someone had a word for it. I believe that stories really do change the world. Today, I was in a classroom in Queens, a place called Central Queens Academy Charter School. In that room, 50 or 60 children whose families have come from all over the world, from Tibet, Nepal, Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and China, and every one of them is a hero, they are their own Odysseus. I live in this world in which there are stories around me, there are stories that can change the world, and my job is to find the form, and to usher these stories into the world in a kind of public way. At this moment, I’m preparing for a play that will be produced off Broadway next week that I’ve written about migrations, Cartography. It’s a theater piece for young people thinking about the challenges of migration. The thing that is central is this idea of trying to fight the tide of forgetting that is so often imposed on all of our stories of migration. 

BOWIE: In 2016, you presented work alongside Pollock, Warhol and Billie Holiday at Cooper Gallery in a show that explored the intersection between jazz music and visual art. Can you talk about the genesis of that piece?

MYERS: I think that one of the things that is interesting about being African American is the idea that we are some of the original hybridized people. We are some of the first people in the world to kind of have defined identities on that hyphen between two cultures. And jazz is absolutely the central exemplar of that hybridity of mixing European instruments with tonal patterns and rhythms that are from the continent. That being said, that specific set of pieces is a piece that was born in Vietnam. 

So, I was living in Vietnam, and early in the morning you hear jazz music kind of wandering through the streets. Like, yo man, where’s this jazz music coming up to my apartment from the street? I ran outside and what I found was a brass band tradition that intersected with other brass band traditions like New Orleans jazz, but it’s used for funerals. So, in the morning you see all these funeral marches and jazz bands, and there were moments of  recognition because the form is so indebted to African Americans. So, I began to make a series of uniforms and instruments for this funeral march that would go from Saigon to New Orleans. What was shown at the Cooper Gallery was a piece of that series of instruments that I built with instrument makers that were from Vietnam. It was subsequently made into a film via my friends who were called The Propeller Group, a Vietnamese-American art collective. We were very excited to take this work that is centered on levels and levels of hybridity and cultural movement, and to literalize some of that hybridity, to make almost mythical beings of the instruments, chimera and hydra of trumpets, French horns, and cymbals. That was the center of that piece. And, for real, I think that when you look at so much of the work that we love, it comes from cultural collision.

BOWIE: How exactly did jazz make its way to Vietnam if there’s not a black community existing there?

MYERS: Right, that would be an obvious question for me. What I found was that it comes from the French. James Reese Europe was an African-American bandleader for the military during World War I. He brought jazz to Europe, he brought it specifically to France, so the French took up this brass band tradition in their colonization of Vietnam, who then picked up this tradition that’s been handed down, and handed down, and handed down. What was fascinating was asking the musicians in Vietnam, “Where did you get this tradition from?” And they said, “We don’t know!” This is what I’m talking about in terms of the currency of forgetting, the tide of forgetting, and I’m hoping in some small way can help to stem that tide. 

 
 

BOWIE: How did your appreciation for Vaslav Nijinsky come about?

MYERS: I’m interested in histories of colonialism. So, Nijinsky as a young Polish talent was taken up into the Russian system and his kind of cultural mix, having been colonized. There’s this thing called drain theory that happens as a result of colonial powers. They take the great talents from the people they are colonizing, and those people become these hybrid figures, people like Nijinsky or Aimé Césaire, or Senghor. So many great poets and intellectual figures are hybrid figures that have been educated in the West, but have come back home and tried to find ways to resurrect their own traditions. Nijinsky is so different, especially because at some point he kind of succumbs to the mental stress and was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was thirty, and never danced again after having revolutionized the world of dance. But, when you read his journal—he kept a meticulous journal—for six weeks just as he was turning the corner of mental health, and when you read that journal you can see how so much of what was affecting him were the cultural pressures of his time; the split and hybridized identity. At one point he writes, “I’m a Negro. I’m a Chinese. I’m a Red Indian. I’m a White.” And he has kind of lost himself, and lost his own sense of his identity. Not only the colonial experience he’s undergoing, but also the ways in which he is replicating the colonial gaze as a dancer. He also dances as other ethnicities. He dances as a Thai, or as an Indian, and that kind of hybridity, and revealing in his journals was and continues to be very inspiring to me.

BOWIE: Do you think the art world would dance more [socially] if they worked more with dancers?

MYERS: Well, the first thing I would like to say is I very much appreciate your recognition that the art world is abysmal when it comes to dance. So, I think that firstly, the art world has some of the worst parties because of this dance aversion. And I also feel like the art world needs to start to back up their imagination of themselves as being global by getting out of their houses, and I mean that both metaphorically and literally. More and more they’re realizing you see the same people in seven cities. I’m not particularly interested in that party. I wish that more of them would come to some of the events that I continually gather. I’m interested in experiencing things and places that could touch you and change the way you see the world. Hopefully, that’s what the work is doing too.

Drapetomania is on view through February 8 at Fort Gansevoort Los Angeles, 4859 Fountain Avenue. Follow Christopher Myers on Instagram @kalyban

A Transcendental Storehouse For Culture: An Interview Of Lauren Halsey

text by Taliah Mancini

photographs by Oliver Kupper


Lauren Halsey’s dream-world is cosmic, funky, carpeted, and technicolored; an atemporal, fantastical, and hyperreal vision of black liberation which she conjures via site-specific installations that celebrate her childhood home.

Iconography and aesthetics (not to mention philosophy, lived experiences, and informal economies) of the diaspora serve as Halsey’s blueprint. Manipulating found objects and cultural artifacts from South Central, she deftly plays the past and present off one another to build a black utopia outside of time. Incorporating, for example, smashed-CD’s, aquarium plants, artificial crystals and rocks, hair extension packs, incense oils, aerosol spray cans, pan-African flags, tchotchkes, figurines, and black-business signage, she shapes a community-based, architecturally-rooted, afro-futurist cosmology.

Perhaps most explicitly, Halsey’s work is embedded in a spatial analysis of racial capitalism. Recognizing the power of oppressive built environments, she works to dismantle hegemony’s spatial ordering—a subversive move against cultural erasure and panoptical city planning. In response to the calculated displacement targeting South Central, she invests in her own architecture, preserving black-owned shops and community spaces by archiving her long-time home. She not only presents a cutting critique of the modern consumer economy but also an active re-constructing of heterotopia.

Creatively and politically, Halsey has carved out a space for herself in an art world that is often complicit in the very systems she re-imagines. With installations that are reminiscent of few conventional object-oriented art works, she is creating a new visual genre, pushing those who enter her fantasy to re-envision the perspective-altering potentials of the visual, aural, sensorial, and spatial. And, firmly rooted in love for her neighborhood, her work is defined in equal measure by healing from trauma and honoring history. Halsey’s dream-world is a moving through abuse to create new realities; an optimistic, grounded, and empowered archiving of the future.  

TALIAH MANCINI: To start, what does your neighborhood mean to you?

LAUREN HALSEY: Neighborhood Pride, Gorgeous color palettes and aesthetics, Black history as it relates to The Great Migration, Family History, My future.

MANCINI: When did you begin creating art?

HALSEY: Intentionally in the 12th grade. Oddly enough one of our first art projects was a carving project that I’m revisiting for my upcoming public project, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project. I was already intrigued and deeply obsessed with collecting and creating records in my notebooks. The 12th grade carving project gave me the form.

MANCINI: I’ve seen pictures of your early maximalist collages. Did your documenting of South Central emerge with these Photoshopped images?

HALSEY: No, documenting and archiving signs, posters, mix CDs, parties, menus, incense n oils, party flyers, hairstyles, bus routes, businesses, knick knacks, t-shirts, greeting cards, local landmarks, city blocks, voices, etc. was already happening. I used the archive I was engaging to create the maximalist blueprints of my neighborhood a few years later when I took my first Photoshop class at El Camino Community College.

MANCINI: Your work is, most notably, a community-based practice. Where does that process start, both conceptually and physically?

HALSEY: With all of the odds already stacked against working class black and brown folks in low income neighborhoods in LA (food, education, police, housing, etc), I can’t imagine not having a community-based practice. My interest is to not only affirm folks through my practice/the artwork but most importantly to do so with tangible results: paid jobs, transcendent programming, free resources and workshops. My upcoming public project, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project will address this conceptually and physically. Here’s a blurb on it:

The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (C.D.H.P.) is a hybrid public art installation and community market created in collaboration with the Crenshaw District that will build and reinforce local economies of South Central LA that can sustain the pressures of rapid gentrification. The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project will exist on an empty lot where over the course of a 3-6 month public installation, four autonomous 16 ft. hieroglyphic towers with open circulation will be constructed. Each tower will include a series of rooms covered in hieroglyphic-style engravings on the interiors and exteriors. Upon entering the structure, the public will be invited to make their own "hieroglyphs" by carving into a series of blank panels serving as a medium to express narratives, share news, honor community leaders, celebrate events, and leave obituaries or memorials. This visual archive of and for the neighborhood will allow community members the freedom to commemorate and monumentalize themselves and one another in a city (and nation) where the place-making strategies of black and brown subjects are increasingly deleted from the landscape.

Through programming that generates paid jobs and provides tangible resources through free workshops on entrepreneurship, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project provides and examines how alternate modes of community building can take place, while providing community members productive inroads to be engaging with, participating in, and benefiting from the top-down pace of development encouraged by Los Angeles' economic imperatives. Importantly, the public project’s investment in community artmaking will document and inscribe into the four towers the plural experience of communities who rarely benefit from, for example, gentrifying landscapes that privilege the lives and experiences of upwardly mobile middle classes. The towers provide space for the city's most overlooked citizens to describe their iconographies, aesthetic styles, informal economies, leisure activities, celebrations, oppression, local histories, and potential futures in the form of a tangible community monument. It is my hope that the publics' engravings and the informal economies The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project creates will inspire productive dialogues about liberation for South Central LA from within, beginning with our dollars.

MANCINI: Your exploration of architecture is brilliant. When did you become interested in re-imagining the built environment?

HALSEY: I’ve always been deeply, deeply, deeply into PFunk. They empowered my imagination at a young age. Early on I was very intrigued by the space making that was happening with PFunk seamlessly on the scale of worlds (outerspace, place, blackness, queerness, me). They beamed me up and into their radical worlds without me ever having to leave my bedroom. They left me totally transformed, always. Who I was/am will always be enough to participate. That relationship to space making carries over to my work where I remix and propose new spaces with what we already have and who we already are, to conjure new reflections on self-determination, affirmation, community wealth building, love, Funk, etc.

My interest in architecture is also biographical as it relates to growing up and living in a LA with so much oppressive architecture and always having questions around who’s building our architecture for us.In architecture school, I became really into the dialog of 60’s/70’s fantasy architecture.

MANCINI: Can you talk about your play with architecture in reference to the resistance of gentrification in South Central?

HALSEY: I can’t omit architecture and our built environment outside of the convo of gentrification. There should be, and are many, responses. I’m interested in responding through interventions with “for us by us architecture.” An architecture that representationally and structurally comes from us to empower us. An architecture that doesn’t signify erasure to disempower us. A Funky architecture. An architecture that comes from our hands.

MANCINI: How do you describe the way funk (Parliament/Funkadelic, Gospel Funk, Jheri Curl Funk, etc.) informs your cosmic black utopia?

HALSEY: Density. Layers. Immersion. Maximalism. Control. Black Style. Black Aesthetics. Deep Time.

MANCINI: What about outer space?

HALSEY: Outer space is limitless. White supremacy, racism classism, sexism, nepotism, consumerism, etc. aren’t the order there. There’s great freedom in contextualizing my projections for the neighborhood in an infinity space without Earth’s baggage.

MANCINI: And nature?

HALSEY: Funkifying nature has a lot to do with my interest in fantasy nature. Seeing nature through Funk sounds. The effect of a Funk nature that’s an assemblage of multiple geographies while remixing and also, sampling place, texture, form via my own renditions of the landscape.

MANCINI: You grew up in South Central, spent time in New Haven for graduate school at Yale, and then moved back to your childhood home. What are your impressions of the LA art communities?

HALSEY: There are so many because of the enormous geographical spread in LA. I spend my downtime in Atlanta. I haven’t been consistently in LA long enough to truly belong to a community, but I think I’m forging one and beginning to join existing ones.

MANCINI: Where (and what) in Los Angeles inspires you?

HALSEY: Black LA, the beaches, the sunsets, bonfires, candy cars, ice cream trucks, the pan man, the elote man, the tamale man, signs, hair, sunsets, taco trucks, freeways at night, hot days, rooftop pools, walking, riding the bus, growing up in church, ceviche, paletas, soul food, my family, chasing lowriders, the roosters, the hills, everything.

MANCINI: How did “we still here, there” at MOCA come about?

HALSEY: I was researching Chinese grotto heavens and became interested in the Mogao Caves. I was intrigued by the cave as a super structure rock form but also, as its function as a transcendental storehouse for culture: research archives of lost cultures, specific histories, discourse and ideas. I proposed to MOCA that I would build a cave-grotto with a series of connected chambers and corridors marking the plurality of black daily cultural experiences in downtown South Central LA. Some chambers include local ephemera and iconographies (i.e. South Central superhero, Okeneus’s original collages, selections of incense n oils, black figurines, mix cds, local newspaper clippings, portraitures, etc.). Other moments will be more speculative, including imaginary of future South Central landscapes, memorials, miniature shrines and statues, poems, rock carvings and soundscapes. Conceptually, I wish to create an aesthetic-sociopolitical record and overview of contemporary South Central in order to mark the evolution and narrative shifts of neighborhoods as they are being increasingly deleted from the LA landscape. Community identities are being lost and some histories aren’t being preserved (i.e. displacement via market-rate condominiums, new stadiums, developments, etc). The long-term goal is to create a permanent public cave-grotto in my neighborhoods that centuries from now will be excavated and inhabited by the future.

MANCINI: It seems like an important component of the installation is you regularly changing the space. What is your role as “pharaoh, high-voltage Funkateer and master architect”?

HALSEY: I can’t give all of my recipes away but in a nutshell, Keep building, Keep visioning, Keep Funking so that the work isn’t a set or an eulogy of itself. It’s a living environment that will accumulate energy, poetics and an archive through the run of the exhibition.

MANCINI: In what ways is the installation connected to your on-going artistic project?

HALSEY: Preservation. Past/Future. Monument. Community. Archive.

MANCINI: What is next for you? Kindgom Splurge? Any new projects on the horizon?

HALSEY:The last iteration of Kingdom Splurge happened a couple years ago. It’s put to rest for now. The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project is next. I’m building a prototype architecture of it for the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA Show that opens in June.

we still here, there was curated by Lanka Tattersall. The exhibition is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue through September 3, 2018. Lauren Halsey will be in gallery every other week on alternating Fridays and Saturdays, beginning Saturday, March 10. For more details visit MOCA. Follow Lauren Halsey on Instagram @summeverythang. Follow AUTRE @autremagazine.

Bad Woman: An Interview of Katya Grokhovsky

text by Abbey Meaker

portrait by Katya Grokhovsky

 

Katya Grokhovsky is an interdisciplinary artist, a curator, and an educator whose process-centric art practice combines installation, performance, video, photo, and collage. Through different expressions of each media, Grokhovsky creates immersive environments and captivating characters that assertively bring to fore issues related to gender, labor, alienation, and displacement, often using her own body to create a relationship between the personal and the political. 

Recently, I came across Grokhovsky’s video work titled “Bad Woman” in which an eccentric character wearing an animal-like mask, fur coat, and high-heels struggles with a stuffed parrot affixed to her shoulder, to situate herself comfortably on a wooden chair placed in a rural environment. Watching this, I felt I were witnessing something new, something authentic- an uncanny character whose discomfort was amplified, satirized. Yet I was able to relate to and recognize in her a sense of resolve, a comfort in her own skin, a resilience. According to Grokhovsky, “Bad Woman” is exhausted; she is many of us; she is what we whisper under our breaths, daily. She gladly fails; she is not here to please anybody; she is eccentric, wild, unruly, unmade, remade, deconstructed.

On a snowy Vermont day I connected with Grokhovsky to discuss this work, her curatorial efforts, and her solo exhibition, System Failure at Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College. 

ABBEY MEAKER: At what point in your life did you begin making things? Was there an inherent interest in art, or did life organically pull you in that direction? 

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: Ever since I can remember I was making something with my hands, drawing on all types of surfaces, designing costumes, writing and staging plays, deconstructing and reassembling objects. I have continuously made art in some way and have been interested in many creative disciplines ever since I was very young, including fashion, interior design, literature, theater, dance and all types of decorative and visual arts. My parents encouraged me and took me to drawing classes since I was 5 years old in the former USSR, in Ukraine, where I went on to art school for children from 10 to 14 years of age, and then onto art school in Australia, Europe and USA, and here I am, a fully-fledged adult artist. I guess I have never really stopped or truthfully grown up. Art making is the way I interpret and experience life and I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life.

ABBEY MEAKER: Of the mediums you employ – installation, performance, video, photography – would you say there is one that more holistically translates your ideas and/or an experience you aim to create for a viewer? How do they work together? 

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I would say installation is the medium that brings it all together for me and creates the desired effect of a totally immersive environment. Video is another vehicle, which can incorporate all of my interests into one format and contain it within itself. I would love to make feature-length films one day, with a cast and a crew. In my installation work, I am able to position, compose and collage many of my works simultaneously and play with the site, size and space. I frequently include performance and video, sound, sculpture and painting, through various experimental propositions of complex situations and worlds within worlds, allowing the viewer to explore and experience a new ground, new system of being, fresh and absurd territories.

ABBEY MEAKER: Your work has been called feminist - do you identify with this label?

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I truly detest labels of any kind, however it is a label I do accept. In a perfect world, an artist would be an artist, not female artist or woman artist or a feminist artist, simply because she expresses strong opinions about her life experience on this planet. I am an artist, a woman and a feminist. I work with feminist themes and look at the world through this lens, so my work gets positioned as such. It is the way I live my life, the way I view the humankind and how I keep on. My views and the stances I take do affect my work and the leitmotifs I am interested in. That makes it feminist. Labels make it easier to digest, to create boundaries, to identify, to exclude and commercialize and segregate, I understand that. Being feminist lines me up historically with some of my favorite artists, writers and mentors, and that is an honor. I do wish we lived in a post-label world, where artists were simply expressing their views in different ways.

ABBEY MEAKER: What do you think 'feminist' actually means within the present context of contemporary art?  

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I think feminist in the context of contemporary art means inclusive, equal, politically charged, questioning, rebellious, critical and non-compliant. It means not taking it lying down, it is a way of life, so it should translate into art that way as well. I am interested in challenging all notions of societal prejudice, standards, systems, hierarchies, specifically patriarchy and capitalism. Being a feminist and an artist has literally saved my life and continues to help me navigate this man’s world as a woman and a maker, so I firmly believe in both as vehicles of analysis, refusal, rage, protest, as well as acts of radical joy, acceptance and pleasure.

ABBEY MEAKER: Can you talk a little bit about the characters in your performances? I am particularly interested in Bad Woman and Bunny Bad.

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: Bad Woman is a character I initially developed for my last solo exhibition in 2017, as a post-election entity, a persona, who truly cannot handle this world anymore, and is gradually unraveling and de-conditioning herself. She is a bad woman, an angry, enraged woman. She is tired, exhausted, she is many of us. Internally, she is what we whisper under our breath daily. She is simply trying too hard, gladly fails, she is not here to please anybody. She is eccentric, wild, unruly, unmade, remade, deconstructed. Through her character, I began a lifelong project of deconditioning, feminine de-stabling, and decentralizing. Bunny Bad followed up, as the next, less gendered character, through which I am able to become a kid again, to play without any results, to explore, to be funny, grotesque, comic, stupid, uncoordinated, ugly. These characters help my own psyche and bring out the hidden creatures that live in me, and all of us, the ones we push away, or oppress, or pretend do not exist.

ABBEY MEAKER: Your installations feature prominently found objects- is the process by which you find these pieces an important part of the work? What are they meant to symbolize? 

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I am naturally both a collector and a destroyer of objects. These traits come from a childhood in the Soviet Union, where materialism did not yet fully exist - as well as immigration, during which belongings were forever discarded and left behind. I am interested in consumerism, in greed and capitalism, where a surplus of objects of desire is not only the sign of our time, but is killing the planet, as well as personal attachment, longing and memory. Most of the objects that appear in my work come from the street; flea markets, thrift stores and online shopping. I employ both intuition and attraction and pull to a particular object as well as rigorous research, especially on the Internet. Each work requires a different approach and is catered specifically to every site and place, depending on the theme and subject matter, be it a brand-new, extremely large beach ball from Amazon Prime, symbolizing an exceptionally futile, wasteful, yet desirable and alluring object of fun, which is meant to last less than an hour, to giant, 8-foot plush teddy bears, to a discarded, old and broken musical instrument found on the streets of NYC, indicating loneliness, nostalgia and reminiscence.

ABBEY MEAKER: Do you consider your curatorial efforts a part of your art practice?

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: Yes, I consider my curatorial work to be an extension and expansion of my own art making studio practice, through which I am able to step out of my own pursuits and explore the community and art being made around me. I really enjoy going out to other artists’ studios, feeling the pulse of my city, envisioning an idea, putting works together, and designing projects. It is all a part of my existing in the world, my attempt at reaching out, at connecting the dots, facilitating for those, whose voices have often been unheard. 

ABBEY MEAKER: What are you hoping to achieve as an organizer supporting other artists?  

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I hope to create a space for the less recognized and commercially viable works, for artists, who have traditionally been excluded and discarded by the art canon. I curate difficult to exhibit works, made by voices that are marginalized in some way. As an immigrant and a woman, I have often been excluded from the discourse myself and I simply try to correct the imbalance, one DIY project at a time. I am not very interested in the accepted, mainstream narrative, which has been fed to me all my life, that of the heterosexual white male artist. There are plenty of platforms for that, globally. I try to create an alternative that must not be alternative. 

ABBEY MEAKER: Are there certain ideas you can engage with as a curator more easily or more successfully than through your art practice?

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: Yes, I respond best to works which deal with process and are materially experimental and explore the body, as well as history, place and site. I often have a visceral response to art, including my own, so I need to be engaged not only intellectually, but bodily, somehow. I let my body speak before my head, when I am curating, but also when I make my own work. I trust my gut completely and rely heavily on my art intuition, which has never failed me yet. I am also interested in artists dealing and expressing their life experience autobiographically or through observation and research, as I do in my work. I don't respond well to extremely minimalist, or highly conceptual work without an engaging process involved in the making of it.

ABBEY MEAKER: You have a solo show titled System Failure at Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College that just opened on February 14 (congrats!) What are you showing? 

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I have been working on-site at the Martin Art Gallery as a visiting artist in residence at the college for the past four weeks and have created a new site-specific installation, comprised of found, collected and bought objects and sculpted assemblages, as well as several recent video performance works. The exhibition deals with the failure of the patriarchal system and society, through exploration of extreme overconsumption, desire and imposed stereotypes. I am interested in investigating gendered standards and structures, as well as particularly capitalist ideas of childhood, through color assignment (pink, blue), teddy bears, beach balls, inflatable unicorns and donuts, as well as plastic shop mannequins manipulated and sculpted with plaster and house paint. It is a complicated exhibition, which has evolved over a year and over the past month on site, through rigorous experimentation with materials, as well as my relationship to the place. I will perform live twice as part of the exhibition, in collaboration with students at Muhlenberg College, cast through the college-wide open all. I am interested in what the atmosphere of an academic institution brings to my work and vice versa, and am grateful to have been very generously supported by the college and the gallery with space, time and materials. 

ABBEY MEAKER: Any curatorial projects coming up you'd like to discuss? 

KATYA GROKHOVSKY: I have been appointed as lead curator of the Art in Odd Places festival and exhibition in 2018, taking place in October, the theme of which will be BODY and will be open for the first time to women, female identifying and non binary artists only. The festival is 14 years old this year and traditionally takes place along 14th street in Manhattan over four days, with performances, installations, sculptures and sound works in the public domain. This year I have also included a group exhibition at Westbeth gallery in the West Village as an extension of the festival and dialogue. I am very excited about this, as I was an artist who participated in the festival three times prior and not only do I know it well, but it is the first time an artist will curate this festival. The theme BODY stems from my own practice and curatorial pursuits and I am especially interested in the body of “other” taking up much needed space in the pubic imagination.

Katya Grokhovsky's SYSTEM FAILURE is on view through April 10th at Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College 2400 Chew Street Allentown, PA 18104. The artist will be performing live in the gallery on March 14th at 5pm and at the closing ceremony on April 10th. She will also be conducting a lecture in the space on March 21st. Follow Katya on Instagram @KATYAGROKHOVSKY. Follow Autre on Instagram @AUTREMAGAZINE.

That's A Damn Fine Painting: An Interview With Artist Adam Parker Smith

text by Adam Lehrer

 

Painting. Multi-media. Installation. Sculpture. All of these tags have been applied to the practice of New York-based artist Adam Parker Smith. All of these tags are or have been correct in their labeling of Smith’s work. But as wild and conceptual as Smith’s work gets at times, he roots his art in the fundamentals of painting. Whether he’s making mylar balloon sculptures or putting together an exhibition of works stolen from other artists (as he did with his Lu Magnus Gallery exhibition Thanks), he’s doing so with acknowledgement of the fundamentals of painting: “I think my work can be jarring but a lot of times it is smooth and cumulative,” he says while laboring over the installation of his current solo show at The Hole in NYC, entitled Oblivious the Greek.  “The work moves well, it’s balanced, and its colors compliment it. One of the elements that make a work successful is being attractive.”


Polite, mild-mannered, and welding a distinguished moustache, Smith is humble while also knowing that he’s onto something. In past interviews, Smith has claimed that he is often short on ideas. That isn’t the case any more, and Smith says in some ways his practice has evolved past idea-oriented work. It seems that he has comforted into the idea that he is good at this art-making thing, and his voracious work ethic indicates that he wants to share his work with the world as much as possible. “I’m not saying that I have a unique gift but I’m hoping that I do,” says Smith. “There’s a possibility. I probably have a less narcissistic way of saying that…”

To clarify, Smith holds the belief that there is a difference between art that “looks like good art,” and art that is “actually good.” A smart and lucky person and can make art that looks like good art. But to make “actually good” art, one has to be gifted. He has grown more comfortable with the fact that making art might be his gift. His current show at The Hole is certainly testament towards this sentiment. Using synthetic materials (purchased with free shipping on Amazon, he adds), Smith created a range of sculptures like mylar balloons cast with resin along with fake foods, fake bronze, fake flowers, and lots of things fake. The faux qualities of the work are important to the aesthetics of and ideas contained within the objects: the materials used are always secondary to the outcome. The outcome is beautiful. These are “actually good” works of art.

Smith and I spoke at length a day before his show at The Hole opened, harping on the differences between art that “looks like good art” and “actually good” art, the virtues in cheap and synthetic materials, applying the fundamentals of painting to different mediums, the benefits of cruel professors, and what being “gifted” at something really means.

ADAM LEHRER: I was reading an old interview of yours where you said you liked the interdependency of materials and ideas. Is that a notion you still subscribe to?

ADAM PARKER SMITH: Yeah, that for me is constant. And I don’t normally like to adhere to rules, or at least arbitrary rules I make for myself within my practice because there are a lot of them. I find myself realizing the rules that I made, and then wondering if they’re necessary to abide by. 

LEHRER: Do personal rules help you push back against institutional rules or general rules within the art world?

SMITH: Well no, I mean my life is pretty conventional outside of my practice. Normally there are severe consequences for doing things in an unconventional manner. But I think when you’re making art that’s the preferred method. So what are the implications of that resistance outside of my practice? I’m not quite sure [laughs].

LEHRER: So you mean that’s the one arena in your life where you sort of get to go against the grain? I’m thinking of someone like Dash Snow, who seems to have gone against the grain in his art and his life and of course paid a price for the latter.

SMITH: I don't know, it’s hard to say. My practice takes up a large part of my life though so it’s nice. A lot of times I get to do what I love doing. I make a lot of work and spend a lot of time making work. It’s nice to be in charge of...something.

LEHRER: Going back to that original idea of interdependency of ideas and materials, how does that manifest? For this show for instance, how do you go from the original ideas to conceptualizing the materials to bring those ideas into fruition?

SMITH: Ideally, they conflate simultaneously. I got my Master’s degree in painting so a lot of times I think like a painter would. One of the big conversations people were always having involved how what you’re painting relates to how you’re painting. I felt like there always had to be that relationship for the painting to be successful so I had to use all these materials to try to find that connection. And further along in my practice I found myself getting closer to more two-dimensional painting, which has a more subtle or intellectual link between what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. So when I’m beginning to generate new ideas or developing an idea I try to think in that mode in-between the two questions, of what is it that I’m painting and how does the process relate to it. After enough practice it becomes second nature to a degree.

LEHRER: I read that you initially started making sculptures to give yourself figures to paint. But now you create sculptures to make and show sculptures, correct?

SMITH: Well there are a lot of painterly aspects (color, composition, form, line, positive and negative space) that I use in sculptures because they’re all beneficial. Although important, construction and utility are my secondary thoughts and I approach my sculptures with really simple painterly ideas.

LEHRER:  Do you often know the idea you’re trying to communicate before you put together a collection of work? Do you know what it’s going to look like but aren’t really sure how to express it?

SMITH: Ultimately I’m not interested in creating an idea-based work because I hate the idea of someone coming in and feeling finished with the work once the idea is communicated to them. In Ernest Hemingway’s Movable Feast (not that I’m really inspired by modern painting or writing because all those guys are bullies), there’s a part when [the characters] go to each other’s studios and say something like, “That’s a damn fine painting!” That’s their only critique. I want to make work that can make people say something like that. I don’t want to make a work that’s just good or pleasing. When they say ‘that’s a damn fine painting’, they’re not saying that it’s a good or pleasing painting but rather that it fulfills a place or purpose to exist in the world. However, the second you start talking about that too much the intentionality starts overshadowing any kind of magic.

 LEHRER: It’s hard to explain but I think I understand.

 SMITH: This is going to sound a lot like bullshit...but I think if an individual is a gifted writer or musician or painter, it’s difficult but not impossible to make a work that looks like what it should be. Making a painting that looks like a good painting is different from making an actually good painting. I think you’d have to be highly intelligent to make a painting that looks like a good painting. It’s possible and it happens a lot since there are lots of really smart people out there. But I think to make an actually good painting, you have to be gifted. That’s more rare. I’m listening to any sort of gift that I may have or working to find it.

LEHRER: Do you feel like you’ve found the exact thing you are gifted at?

SMITH: I don’t know, I’m making art and hoping that’s it [laughs].


LEHRER: It’s refreshing to hear that, actually.

SMITH: Or some people are just good at things. And if they just listen to their natural instincts, I think it’s possible for them to do something that they didn’t expect. You know when you see work that looks like it’s emulating good work and work that just looks like good work. I guess my point is that I try to make art in a way that comes from the gut and hope that if there is a gift, it comes through. That’s pretty corny [laughs].

LEHRER: That show you did where you stole all your friends’ art works: was that an exercise of you trying to juxtapose “art that looks good” versus “actually good art?”


SMITH: That was more of a social or conceptual project in terms of showing each theft as sort of the material I was working with. I’m not a curator and wasn’t really curating that show, even though I acted as curator in the way that I was making a painting. But with that said, all of the acquaintances of mine in the show are valued as artists and the works of theirs that I apprehended I thought were strong. As far as any further judgment on how gifted any of those artists were, there’s always a spectrum.

LEHRER: I hate to refer to the press release that The Hole put out, but I’m going to. It said something about how a lot of the imagery in these sculptures has this faux quality but in that fakeness there’s something real. Is that at all accurate in your thinking, and then if so, what is that truth?


SMITH: Painters go to the store to get paint that is a chemical-based product like zinc or aluminum. Those are the brushstrokes. Those are the elements of the composition and the composition is beautiful. Whether you’re going to propose to your partner on the beach or the parking lot of McDonalds, it’s a beautiful thing. Or if your child is born in the bathtub with monks chanting or in the backseat of a taxi, it’s still the beautiful birth of a child.

LEHRER: The outcome is still beautiful, the circumstances or materials used are less important than the final outcome.

PARKER: Yeah, so that’s just the material that I’m using right now. I like it--its accessible, it’s cheap, I can afford it, and I can order it online on Amazon prime for free two-day shipping [laughs]. But actually these synthetic materials are super technology: if you showed mylar balloons to someone 500 years ago they’d be mind-blown. And these were people sculpting beautiful figures with marble. I doubt that they’d be sculpting with marble after seeing these thin, mylar-inflated balloons that can float and weigh nothing. I think that any artist in any century ultimately would be drawn to these materials, because they’re undeniably beautiful. I think marble and bronze are incredible too. But it’s more expensive...and there’s no free shipping [laughs].

LEHRER: Your PS1 studio visit said you “Create elements to cultivate environments that are haunting, familiar, and alien." I know that the installation part of your artworks is important too, so are you trying to create a similar headspace? Should the installation have a similar quality to how you felt in the environment that you made the work in?

SMITH: No, not for me. I try to think of where the work is going to show as I’m making it. I envision it in that space and make it so that it’s appropriate for that. For instance, a lot of the work in here is way too large for my studio, so I had to put myself in this place while I was making it. So I think of the studio as a purely utilitarian place for myself. I

LEHRER: It’s always funny because I feel like journalists especially try to attach these pseudo spiritual qualities to the ways in which the artist works. But you don’t get the sense that maybe how you work or what you create changes with different tweaks and adjustments to your studio space or anything like that?

SMITH: I mean if I were to get a studio with higher ceiling I would make taller works. [laughs] Yeah, artists are like goldfish in the way they sort of expand and contract based on their environment. So it definitely affects me but living an interesting life is as important to my practice. It’s like a pressure cooker to be enriched in life and the studio space is like a small part of that.

 LEHRER: I read somewhere that you like incorporating illusion. I guess this show with the perceived weightlessness of these objects could even qualify as illusion. Do you have an intended effect for using illusion? Is it supposed to throw the viewer off or make the viewer connect with it?

SMITH: Everybody loves magic because it’s fun. We all know it doesn’t really exist but it’s fun anyway. I probably would do things the right way if I could afford it. Making undulating marble and gigantic casts of mylar balloons like Jeff Koons—that’s not a possibility for me. Much of the illusion comes from adversity: “how do I accomplish the things I want to accomplish with the means I have available?” But people like magic so it’s cool.

LEHRER: I read something about this volatile professor that you had in your grad school that lit a fire under your ass. Do you feel like you make best work under a lot of stress or duress?

SMITH: It’s hard to say because it’s been a long time since I’ve been at school and that stressed out, so I’m not sure what to compare that against. But I like to have some sort of agitation, whether it’s self-induced or an external factor. But after the initial shock of having that professor really go after me, I kinda’ dug it. It takes a lot of energy and consideration for someone to come in and lay into my work in a really aggressive manner. So I appreciated that from him.

LEHRER: Was he harsh to other classmates too?

SMITH: Not any that I knew, but I did hear he did that sort of thing to other people. He really singled me out, which made me feel even better in the end. I observed him years later with other students that were talentless in my opinion and probably his as well, and he just didn’t really give a shit about them. He would just say, “Looks good,” or whatever. Not to be egotistical again, but when he came into my studio I felt as though he saw potential. He felt obligated as a teacher to get on my ass about it.

LEHRER: It’s like that movie Whiplash.

SMITH: That’s funny because you watch that movie and walk away thinking if that guy was a bastard or was doing the kid a favor. 

LEHRER: I read that you sometimes struggle with ideas but I thought it was interesting because you’re making art all the time. So how does that work?

SMITH: Generating ideas has become less of a problem for me. I definitely do a lot of experimenting. I think you have to learn to read this new visual language that you’re speaking and it takes a while for you to be fluent in it. Sometimes I hit it right away but a lot of times I have to wait into it a little bit. To answer your question there are a lot of things that are produced in the studio that never leave. Or they take a walk into the dumpster.

 LEHRER: How do you know if something is worth showing? Is it intuitive or trained?

SMITH: I’ve never really been good at articulating those qualities. I know when it’s right for me and just rely on that.

Adam Parker Smith "Oblivious The Greek" is on view now until July 24 at the Hole Gallery, 312 Bowery, New York. Text, interview and photographs by Adam Lehrer. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Working In Real Time: An Interview With Multi-Disciplinary Artist Mai-Thu Perret

text by Adam Lehrer

 

Swiss multi-disciplinary artist Mai-Thu Perret understands that the most interesting artwork lives within the viewer’s mind, as an impression, memory, or dream, as much as it lives within the space that the art is presented. “I think the memory one carries of a work of art after one has left it behind, whether by turning the page or leaving the room in the museum is almost as important as the object itself,” said Perret in an email.

That isn’t to say that her work lacks aesthetic dazzle, however. Her recent exhibit at the David Kordansky booth at Frieze New York, for example, was one of the standout presentations of the fair. Through her brightly colored Roschach ink blot paintings and her female figurine sculptures, Mai-Thu communicates a narrative. But that narrative is best brought to life through the mental processes of the installation’s viewer. Perret loves poetry and writing, having received a BA from Cambridge University, but she is most concerned with creating the settings and the landscapes of the narratives of her art works as a point of genesis for the creation of art objects. The weaving together of these disparate ideas within the space often becomes the burden of the viewers, facilitating a challenging yet intellectually rewarding interplay between the artist and the viewer.

Perret is fascinated by the idea of the utopia, or, a unique landscape with a set of ideals that would theoretically facilitate a revisionist art history. Perret envisions a utopia in which the ideals and creativity of women and marginalized groups are as much a part of the conversation surrounding art history as those of men. Perhaps Perret’s best known and most labored over work, entitled The Crystal Frontier, is most exemplary of this idea. The Crystal Frontier is an imagined utopia of women living in the desert in New Mexico. Perret has built on the idea of The Crystal Frontier over her career, imagining its artifacts and furniture and fashions. The Crystal Frontier not only poses an fascinating conceptual narrative, but also has proven to be a place of contemplative creativity for Perret; one in which she can return to as a renewable source of inspiration.

Perret’s most recent exhibition at Nasher Sculpture Center, Sightings, builds upon The Crystal Frontier while connecting it to a real world community considered by Perret to be the kind of utopia that she has been imagining in her work. This utopia, a secular Kurdish community in the Syrian region of Rojava, champions female leaders and implements democratic ideals in a war-ravaged country. Perret has made eight human figures representing the women in all-female militia groups in the area.

At SOLUNA, Perret presented a performance entitled Figures in which a life-size marionette (whose body is animated by dancer Anja Schmidt) and a dancer enact an Indian mystic, a 19th-century American Shaker, a 1950s computer programmer, an Artificial Intelligence, and a journalist. At first, the dancer and puppet are separate entities, eventually merging and leaving the stage to make way for the journalist on a typewriter, played by Perret. In the style of Japanese puppetry known as Bunraku, there is no illusion concealing the fact that this is a fictional work. You can see the stage manipulations in real time. Perret asks that you accept her ideas as art without concealing the fact that this is anything other than art. Once again, Perret sets up the narrative’s background, leaving room for the viewer’s imagination to complete the piece.

Perret answered some of my questions about her ideas and work over email, discussing the narrative structure in her art, revising history to incorporate the ideas of the marginalized, and the majesty of the desert.

ADAM LEHRER: When learning about the premise for Figures, I couldn’t help but think about the Crystal Frontier. In the Crystal Frontier, women are living away from society, but forming their own society. In Figures, women are leaving their bodies through trance. It made me think of the idea that an alternative society can be a type of freedom, but liberation from the body is the ultimate freedom. Were you at all thinking along these lines when conceptualizing Figures?

MAI-THU PERRET: I wasn't really thinking about the Crystal Frontier when I was putting together Figures, but there are definitely a lot of common points and references. I've always been interested in ways one can leave one's self and identity behind. These ideas of trance and mysticism are definitely connected.

ADAM LEHRER: Your work often deals with this questioning of the manner in which art and culture is consumed, do you think that the theoretical utopias you explore could ever be possible considering the almost hyper-capitalist mentality of the contemporary art market?

MAI-THU PERRET: There is no place for this type of thinking within the art market, but the market is not the be-all and end-all and I think there are lots of people trying to find alternative ways of living and making art today.

ADAM LEHRER: In these projects, like the Crystal Frontier, does this entire world live in your imagination before you create the objects? Or do the specific objects and sculptural manifestations present themselves through the process?

MAI-THU PERRET: It's always a process, very little is fixed in advance. I set-up a broad set of parameters and then I construct what comes within it.

ADAM LEHRER: Did you ever consider writing literature? Your sense of story and narrative is really astounding even in terms of conceptual artists.

MAI-THU PERRET: I did when I was a student, but I was useless at constructing a narrative. I've always been better at imagining atmospheres or situations rather than proper stories with a beginning and an end. The open-ended space of the exhibition, where you can combine objects and moods to create a larger whole that the viewer passes through and pieces together in their minds, is probably more suited to this way of thinking. I've always been interested in experimental writing and poetry, and sometimes I think I will try to write again at some point.

ADAM LEHRER: It seems that your sense of “the utopia” is broken down into various different utopias; a choice of utopias if you will, as opposed to one all-encompassing utopia. As you said in an interview with the White Review, the Crystal Frontier’s utopia’s reasons for excluding men is different than Plato’s for excluding artists. Am I at all accurate in these assumptions?

MAI-THU PERRET: Yes, I think that's pretty accurate. The idea behind the all-female environment was to create a space where the dominant and habitual paradigm could be reversed in order for new possibilities to emerge, rather than a desire for exclusion.

ADAM LEHRER: Your work deals with the history of avant-garde within art, do you feel that this history has often been biased towards men and are you hoping to break down that history within your work?

MAI-THU PERRET: I definitely think that the history of art, like Western history as a whole, has been male-dominated. I'm interested in revisionist histories and histories that focus on forgotten or marginalized figures and realities. I like to use my work as a kind of speculative space to imagine different futures or untold stories.

ADAM LEHRER: You have discussed the idea of a desert as an ideal space or utopia because it’s outside the world, but do you ever recall being drawn to the desert aesthetically? \

MAI-THU PERRET: I absolutely love the desert, and the Crystal Frontier narrative was definitely born from my encounter with the American West. Deserts, like islands, are incredibly meditative places, and they can also be hostile and inhuman. I think this feeling of a geological space, where men are minuscule in relation to the immensity of the landscape, and where time is counted in millions of years rather than in human life spans, is important to the work.

ADAM LEHRER: Is it ever difficult to find the balance that allows your use of text and narrative to emphasize but not overshadow the viewer’s appreciation of the objects you create and present? 

MAI-THU PERRET: I'm very aware of the fact that if you give a lot of information to the viewer you risk cutting them off from the actual experience of the work and leading them into seeing only the things you have been talking about. That's one of the biggest problems with wall texts and all the didactic para-texts one encounters in museums. When I present text, it's usually in an attempt to subvert these institutional prompts and open other spaces of thoughts that the viewers can hopefully dive into. My text works are usually fictions that complicate the reading of the works rather than provide explanations for them.


ADAM LEHRER: In an interview with John Armleder, you discussed the manner in which people see art shows on the Internet, and how the experience is diminished. Do you purposefully try to create art than needs to be experienced in person in opposition to this notion?

MAI-THU PERRET: I don't think I create art specifically to counter the mediated reality of the screen worlds we inhabit today, but of course I think of my work as something that must be seen directly and which must almost be touched with the eyes to be really seen. That said, I love looking at art in books, and what's fascinating about art is that it exists both in the mind and in real space.

ADAM LEHRER: For Figures, what drew you to Bunraku and the idea of singer and musician sitting on stage as character and puppet?

MAI-THU PERRET: I've always loved the Asian forms of theater, like the Balinese puppet show or the Noh theater, where there is no backstage and no attempts at hiding the structures that support the experience of the performance. When I discovered Bunraku, I was amazed by the fact that the viewer's attention was constantly moving from puppet to manipulator, and by the strange relationship between the living and the inanimate this created. At times in Bunraku you can get so immersed in the movements of the puppet that [the puppet] seems more real than the people manipulating it, and I wanted to work with this idea. I was also drawn to the very special place the voice occupied in Bunraku, since the voice of the puppet is dissociated from it and clearly emitted by the singer who sits on the sidelines. It's not about illusionism; it’s about the way that the spectator assembles all these separate elements in his/her mind.

ADAM LEHRER: How did the experience of creating a narrative through performance and experience compare to that of creating a narrative through objects and examining those objects?

MAI-THU PERRET: In performance you are working in real time. What you create is instantly erased by new movements or actions. It's a very different type of memory and attention.  

Sightings: Mai-Thu Perret will be on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center until July 17, 2016. Text by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Annik Wetter. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE 

Love Is Something Heavy: An Interview with Mixed Media Artist Sara Rahbar

Sara Rahbar is an artist who bravely transverses borders and permeates boundaries. Though often labeled an “Iranian American artist” (her family fled Iran in 1982 during the beginning of the Revolution), she prefers to relocate herself in a collective humanity. Transcending genre, her work ranges from photography and paint to textiles and sculpture. Rahbar’s work reflects this permeability, combining seemingly antithetical ideas – American flags sewn together with traditional Middle Eastern fabrics, hearts made out of military backpacks – in a beautiful and generative juxtaposition.

At the same time that Rahbar moves fluidly between varying geographies and ideations, she maintains immovable strength in herself and her work. She says, “I love strong things.” Here, she’s talking about working with bronze in sculpture. But this statement speaks to the artist’s attitude towards art, selfhood, and humanity at large. In a world where pervasive pain and violence can feel crippling, Rahbar is able to find peace – by going vegan, by thinking critically, and namely, by concretizing our anxieties through art.

Sara Rahbar will be showing new work from now until May 6th at NADA in New York City for Carbon 12 Dubai Gallery. We got to talk to the artist before the opening about exploring identity, documenting history through art, and communicating emotion in the age of superficiality.  

OLIVER KUPPER: Your work deals a lot with conflict and identity loss. This sense of tumult has really seeped into your upbringing. Do you have really clear memories of leaving Iran during the revolution?

SARA RAHBAR: No, I really don’t. I have blacked out a lot. I left Iran when I was like four and a half or five. And I can barely remember anything from that whole time period. In the beginning people just assumed that my work was about identity because my first body of work was the flag series, but I wasn’t thinking about identity  at all when I made them, it was always about so much more than that for me.

KUPPER: That’s really interesting.

RAHBAR: It’s more about what I’ve witnessed. I’m recording, like a camera, this history that’s happening around me. I don’t think much about my identity. I don’t care much about it, to be honest with you. The only time I care about it is when I am being labeled. Being labeled as “Iranian American” really bothers me. I just don’t feel like I’m any of those things. I’m just a human being living on the planet earth.

KUPPER: So at that age, you really had no memory of that. The art you’re making now came from a later period. And it was just a circumstance.

RAHBAR: I don’t consciously try to bring anything back into my work. Iran is such a faded memory for me. The last couple of times that I was there, I felt so disconnected. The memories are gone and it doesn’t feel like home. I’ve stopped going back. I don’t remember anything enough to actually be able to use it in my work. But there’s something there. The memories are gone, but the feelings are left. There’s a lot that is subconscious – frustration, anger, fear, confusion. But I’m definitely not trying to mesh any two cultures or identities together, I just follow my instincts when it comes to my work.

KUPPER: How old were you when you started to communicate your ideas through art?

RAHBAR: I think I started drawing when I was very little. I think that i was around five or six years old. I remember collecting stuff and drawing. Of course, I didn’t think it was anything serious. I just always liked making things.

KUPPER: You were being creative.

RAHBAR: Yeah. I think it was an instinct.

KUPPER: Were your parents really traditional, or did they support you being creative?

RAHBAR: They weren’t very traditional. My mom, and my brother were always very supportive. At the same time, I don’t think anyone really understood what the hell I was doing or why, including me. There definitely was a fear of, “How the hell are you going to be able to support yourself doing this?” I wouldn’t say anyone was religious, traditional, or conservative. Nothing like that at all.

KUPPER: It’s rare when a kid wants to become an artist.

RAHBAR: Unless you have a family that has a background in the arts, it can be be kind of scary thing. It’s hard to imagine how you’re actually going to sustain yourself from doing this.  There is a lot of unknown, like everything else in life.

KUPPER: What did your parents do?

RAHBAR: My mom was a social worker in Iran. She worked with runaways and abused children. But when she came to the US with my father they went into the restaurant business. You have your degree when you’re in your home country, and you come to a new country and you have to start from scratch. When we came here, we had nothing, and my uncle owned a restaurant. So that’s where my father went to work. It was easy and it paid the bills for a family of four. And later on they eventually went on to own their own restaurant.

KUPPER: Well, Americans love to eat. You open a restaurant, and Americans will be there to eat the food. 

RAHBAR: [Laughs.] Yeah, you figure, it’s a basic necessity…

KUPPER: You went back to Iran, and you worked on a really interesting photography series. What did you discover about your return and this work? What did you discover about yourself?

RAHBAR: That was when I finished school. And by “finished school,” I mean I ran out of money. So I had to figure some things out. I didn’t understand what it meant to have a body of work, or to do a series. I just knew that I had to find my own voice. My first instinct – and I always go by instinct – was to take a plane right from school in London to Iran. Everything happened like a domino effect. It was the 2015 election, so there was a combination of influences. First, I would go into the studio with all these things I had collected – costumes, objects and decorations that were used for horses and donkeys, random things I’d find in flea markets. At the same time, I was documenting the elections with sound and photography. For some reason, the camera was the first thing that I picked up when I went there. I always painted and drew, but it wasn’t enough for me. So I figured, I’ll do photography, sound, and projection. Painting always left me feeling like I needed more. Also, in Iran, I had a lack of space, so it was just easier to photograph. Everything was so new and different. I kept going back and forth, photographing and documenting. Now, when I look back on it, I think, “What the hell was that?” Not the stuff on the streets with the election, but the stuff in the studio. I don’t know what the hell that was. It was just about objects and color. I was trying to sort some things out. I’m more connected to the sculptures I’m doing now. I feel like the photographs were me trying to resolve something in my head.

KUPPER: Or it was an experiment.

RAHBAR: That period was very experimental. I was also super young. This was ten years ago. It was very raw. Like, “I like this. So I’m going to put it on my head and take a photo.” But then again I was just following my very basic and immediate instincts, and I still am. [Laughs.]

KUPPER: Did you ever feel like what you were doing was going to be censored while you were there?

RAHBAR: For sure. But I always knew that I would leave eventually. There was always this angst and discomfort that I felt when I was in Iran. I was always reminded somehow that I was a foreigner and a woman, and this always made me feel very uncomfortable. So I always knew that I could never show the work there, or stay there long term.

"There are so many different elements at play– violence, workers, pain, love; it’s the human condition.  Being alive on this planet and trying to go from one day to the next. I don’t really think it through too much. It’s instinctual. It comes from what I’m witnessing around me."

KUPPER: Is that why you left, to be able to show that work?

RAHBAR: No. It was like a relationship that comes to an end. It just ran its course. I remember waking up and being like, “I’m done.” I’m getting a plane ticket and not coming back.

KUPPER: Interesting. And you went to New York after that?

RAHBAR: Anywhere can be your home; it’s for you to decide what “home” means to you. You can restart anywhere.  And for me, New York has always felt like my home.

KUPPER: Did the flag series become before or after that? Or during?

RAHBAR: I made my first flag for my graduation project when I was still in London. It was right around that time of the crazy chaos of 9/11. I never thought that in 10 years I would make 52 flags.

KUPPER: As a mixed media artist, what do you enjoy about each medium that you employ, and what are some of their limitations?

RAHBAR: I can’t think of too many limitations. I love bronze, and I love wood, and there are so many different kinds of wood and bronze, and so many different techniques that can be used, I’m learning more and more every day. I didn’t specifically study art. So I don’t have any specific technical skills. I make things and I learn as I go along. And I don’t think that that is necessarily a bad thing. I make mistakes, I figure things out and I don’t let anything stop me, I keep moving forward no matter what. And I like that freedom. Sometimes, it’s a limitation and it can be frustrating. With bronze especially, because it’s expensive, definite, and time-consuming. But I feel like it’s good to make mistakes, learn and make your own way. Sometimes the mistakes are the best things that can possibly happen, good things can happen when you let go and let things come on their own, naturally.

I always knew that I was going to do sculpture. Working with textiles, painting, and taking photos, always felt safer for me somehow, it took me a while to make that jump to bronze and wood. I had to work up the courage, but now I feel completely free.

KUPPER: There’s a lot of freedom, but you also have a lot of control over your materials. It seems like control is also an integral part of your work. Would you say that’s true?

RAHBAR: I have issues with control. It’s a very strong underlying theme in my work– guns, police nightsticks– objects that hold things down, hold things together, and contain things. I use these objects a lot. It definitely stems from my childhood. I don’t like to feel controlled. I have issues with police and authority. It comes through in my work.

KUPPER: What can we expect with your new work being shown with Carbon 12 at NADA?

RAHBAR: It’s new work. I’m recording a history that is taking shape and form around me. There are a lot of old tools and guns used in these works.  They are like these historical sculptural totem poles. There are so many different elements at play– violence, workers, pain, love; it’s the human condition.  Being alive on this planet and trying to go from one day to the next. I don’t really think it through too much. It’s instinctual. It comes from what I’m witnessing around me. And If I sit there and analyze it too much, I will kill it.

KUPPER: It’s hard to live sometimes. It’s a very intense world.

RAHBAR: [Laughs.] Not to be depressing and negative, but that’s how it is.

KUPPER: It seems like we have art to be able to put those pieces together, like a psychological puzzle.

RAHBAR: Exactly.

KUPPER: Which is why your work is so interesting. Is your work about finding peace or coping with war?

RAHBAR: I would like to find peace. I find peace when I’m making the work. I was definitely not at peace when I was younger. I’m getting closer to it as I get older. As long as I’m working, there is peace within me. I’m very aware, that when I’m not working, I’m uncomfortable in my own skin. The work makes me feel comfortable, and allows me to be able to be with myself, and the world around me. My work is very therapeutic for me. It saves me from myself time and time again.

I’m very sensitive, I don’t like seeing humans or animals in pain. I’m a vegan, and it upsets me tremendously when I see animals being slaughtered and tortured. Images of war upset me, violence kills me, sometimes it feels like we are constantly trying to kill and eat everything around us. And there is so much happening at the same time, that it’s easy to become overwhelmed and feel exhausted and paralyzed.

KUPPER: I agree with you. There’s a lot happening.

RAHBAR: You just want to hit pause, and tell everybody to stop what ever it is that they’re doing.

KUPPER: You just want to stop and have a moment to think, and get people to consider what they’re doing.

RAHBAR: Humans behave very badly. We are constantly attempting to kill off each other, this plant and all the living things that live on this plant with us.

KUPPER: The animal torture, the war– with the Internet, you have so much access to what’s going on. It gets even more intense because you can’t hide from it.

RAHBAR: Exactly. I go on Instagram, and I get so overwhelmed sometimes. The images, the videos – there’s so much access and information. And just because you aren’t looking at it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.

KUPPER: Do you have any other series that you’re working on? Or are you continuing to work with these materials? Do you have a dream project you want to work on?

RAHBAR: I feel like bronze is my dream material. I love strong things. Glass makes me super uncomfortable. Lace, soft fragile things make me uncomfortable. Bronze makes me so happy. I feel like I found my material. And mixing wood and bronze together, that’s my happy place. Right now, I’m working on a lot of isolated body parts in bronze.  I read this quote the other day by Benjamin Alire Saenz that really got to me: “Love was always something heavy for me. Something that I had to carry.” …That hit me supper hard when I read it, and It has been the inspiration for the body of work that I’m working on currently.

Bronze, on its own, can feel cold, but when I combine the bronze with wood and the objects that I collect, it softens it some how. Making objects with bronze and wood, that’s my happy place. 

You can see new work by Sara Rahbar at Carbon 12 Dubai's booth (4.05) during the NADA Art Fair in New York from May 5 to May 8, 2016. Intro text by Keely Shinners. Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photographs by Arash Yaghmaian